Okay, so what am I currently doing to keep myself from spending too much? I have little goals that I am pursuing.

Goal 1: Get my groceries under $200 per month.

This was easy when our out to eat budget was ridiculous, a little bit harder now that we limit the out to eat to a couple of times per month. Despite my being lazy, I and my dh have been learning to cook from scratch. And I mean, totally from scratch.

Sadly, this is so easy now that its kind of sad that we thought it would take too much time. Currently my dh is finding a bread recipe that we like so we can stop buying bread. We work together to make sure there are leftovers and recipes waiting for us when we get home because coming up with the idea while starving is usually what results in me saying let's eat out.

Step 2 was really comparing prices. I thought I had been doing this before, but making the conscious effort to try to only buy really good deals (on sale or bulk) and really examining what a good deal is what got me from $400 a month to $250 along with the cooking from scratch.

Good example, we occasionally like snacks so I decided to get pudding cups. Normally I would grab a pack of 4 at the 10 for $10 sale and think I was getting a deal. So wrong. I went looking for the bulk 24 pack, it was $5.77. So it still beat out the sales price and in my house, we will eventually go through the 24 pack. You do this with 10 items everytime you go and pretty soon the costs drop.

Step 3 of this goal is developing a price book. For the longest time I had this running in my head and thought that was enough. It isn't. I am still working on this one but look forward to when I have it up and working.

The really big thing about this goal, is not that it saves me a tremendous amount of money but that it keeps me from spending money on other things by keeping me entertained.

Every month I get to start over on this goal, whether or not I did good the month before so I never get disheartened. For me, that is huge because we have some pretty big debt goals and they take a long time.