Budgeting and Frog Poop

I'm getting my bike out from the back yard this morning and almost stepped in frog poop. Again.

We have a lot of frogs in our yard that come out at night and eat bugs or whatever they do hopping around like that, and it took us a long time to connect the strange slug looking things we would find on the ground with the the frogs hopping around, but we finally figured it out that frogs go poop, too. I'm just glad they are small animals who therefore make small poop. Cause it's all over the place.

And budgeting.

We were discussing where all of our money goes and why we never have any, so decided to start keeping track of where it's spent, something I used to do years ago and in fact found the notebook that I had been writing everything down in. It is kind of an eye-opener, seeing where all the dollars disappear to and can help figure out areas where you are SPENDING TOO DAMN MUCH MONEY ALREADY!

Like food. So far this month we have spent $304.20 at grocery stores. For only two people. But, most of the food we buy is fresh and healthy, not much in the way of pre-packaged foods and certainly no cheap stuff like macaroni and cheese or spaghetti. I wish I could eat macaroni and cheese and spaghetti, but those are big no-no's in low carb land.

So, is an average of $150 a week, $75 a person good or bad? About $10.00 a day for three meals per person is actually pretty cheap, so now I don't feel so bad about spending that much. Whew.

Of course we did eat out a few times so far this month. $103.23 spent in meals out to be exact, but none of these meals were at restaurants where we had to tip. Twice we had pizza and salad, lunch at McDonalds once, and one night we went over to Sizzler for salad bar.

And how about feeding the four legged ones? So far $83.50 in cat food (and litter) so about $6.00 a day for cat maintenance. Which works out to $1.00 a day per cat. Not too bad I guess. Cheaper than kids anyway.

It will be interesting to see how it all adds up at the end of the month. Or depressing maybe.