January Challenge - Week 2

Here's how my progress went on week two of the January Challenge. Many thanks to Carla for hosting.

• For the financial challenge, my goal is to keep our weekly spending to $360/week. This includes the following categories (and, does not include standard bills like the mortgage, child care, etc). . . And, the second week did not go as planned! We were out of basically every kind of grocery in our house - flour, sugar, brown sugar, butter, canned tomatoes, black beans, chicken, ground beef. . . You name it, we were out of it!
• Groceries - $281.43. :-( Holy smokes. Our monthly budget is $500, so I'm trending way up.
• Dining out - $16.55 - I bought snacks (and a Gatorade for N, who really wasn't feeling well) at skiing.
• Gifts - $6.56 - I picked up a gift for N, that was a craft project.
• Health/Misc - I spent $10 on parking at my race on Saturday, because I was running behind & they were out of parking. Fiscal fail!
• Clothes (mine & kids) - $0.
• Kids lessons - $0.
• Gas - $36.31
• Personal (this is hair cuts, etc) -
• Car - $259.17. We had to renew our car tabs, & we had both cars washed at the car wash following skiing. It's been below freezing here, so no hand washing.

Total spend for the week, & well over our goal $610.02. So frustrating! I'm hoping that we'll need very minimal groceries this week. I think the big thing I'm noticing is that our grocery spending is going up, as our eating out is going down. To be expected, but I'd really hoped to drive down our grocery budget further.

• For the decluttering challenge, my goal is to get rid of (either sell, toss, or donate) 20 items per week in January. Bonus goal would be to clean my closet & dresser! Carla also gave us an additional challenge of cleaning out our junk drawer!

I did, in fact, get my junk drawer cleaned out! I didn't make as much progress on my donation pile, but I'm well past 40 for the past couple of week, so on track. I've cleaned out my dressers, & I still have a giant pile of Ebay donations sitting on the floor of my closet. That's on my list for next week.

Here's the before & after pictures of my junk drawer, plus my giant closet mess. :-)

How did you do on your January Challenge in Week 2?