Our first week's worth of spending

Week one of 2016 is here, and we're actively trying to manage our expenses, at Chez Hawaii Plan. :-) Taking a note from a few other bloggers, I've decided to track our weekly expenses agains the budget amount. Only wrinkle is that this doesn't include our yearly budget. We break our budget into two groups - monthly expenses (groceries, dining out, utilities, etc) & yearly expenses (travel, kids college, boys activities, etc).

I know how much we should be spending monthly/weekly on our Monthly Expenses, but there's less rhyme or reason to our Yearly Expenses spending patterns.

Either way, I'll try to do a more thorough job tracking & monitoring the Monthly Expenses. All told, we have about $700 a week to spend on the following categories:

• Childcare (easily the biggest outlay)
• Cleaning service
• Dining out
• Toiletries
• Entertainment
• Gas
• Groceries
• Utilities
• Liquor

Even though the yearly expenses don't get spent evenly, the approximate weekly budget for those are $535/week.

And, here's what we spent the first week of January!

• Clothing - although I did buy a pair of jeans, I returned a few other things, and have a credit in my "clothing" budget of $8.57
• Travel - a flight to M to join us for the boys birthday trip. We weren't sure when we booked the other flights if he would be able to change his work schedule to accommodate, and he was able to.  Total spent = $239.20
• Childcare - $478. And, not even on this week's childcare, but booking a camp for the week the boys are out of school in February. :-(
• Entertainment - $3.50 - we opted not to go to Star Wars after we booked tickets on Fandango (the kids had another activity come up), but still had to pay the service charge. Love that Fandango allows you to cancel!
• Groceries - $212. Stock up on protein & a few random other items.
• Utilities - $218.06, which included quarterly water charges & a month of power for our vacation house, as well as a monthly water charge for our SF house.

All told, we spent $1142.19. So, significantly over our weekly spending budget. That said, I have to have a camp for the kids while I work, so that's over a third of the spending. And, travel comes out of the yearly budget. 

It will be interesting to see how this trends over time, and whether the weekly tracking is useful.

What about you? How did you do with your first week of January? Did you stay on track?