February Wrap Up

Today was the perfect day to complete our February budget wrap up and update/balance my budget spreadsheet. We had a snow storm all day yesterday and it continued on this morning - I’m not sure how much ended up falling but it’s definitely over a foot. The drive home from work yesterday was okay, but I take a secondary highway to and from work so they don’t alway get to clearing it right away. After that really bad blizzard a few weeks ago I feel like I can drive thru anything.

So onto the numbers:

Grocery budget was over what I had planned (but as I expected). We finished the month at $574.94. This included two big shopping trips with a lot of fruit and veggies. As I spoke about in my last post, G wasn’t feeling well so I tried to focus on improving what we ate. G is feeling better now, the doctor noted that his body was fighting an infection (not sure if this is lingering from Covid or not) - but also noted G’s cholesterol is higher than normal. So our focus has been to try to reduce this naturally. G has been eating oatmeal for breakfast (instead of just skipping it), eating more fruits (grapes, bananas, apples, oranges - we have a fruit bowl right in the middle of our kitchen), and incorporating more fish. He goes for a check up and follow up testing in about a month so we can see if these actions have been helping. An interesting side effect of these eating habit is both G and I have lost weight! Just 3 pounds each, but it’s still a nice surprise. 

Our fuel costs were surprisingly low, at $310.00, but we were in isolation for 5 days and didn’t go anywhere.

Looking at our numbers year to date, we are saving 56% of our income! And this number doesn’t include pension contributions as they come out of our payroll automatically. I’ll be curious to continue watching this number thru out the year as things even out but if we can end the year with our highest percentage category being savings: I feel like that would be a win. 

- M