Loving a Life of Biblical Womanhood
For the last three years, I have written about the budgeting spreadsheet that I created in Excel to manage my household expenses. This is always an INCREDIBLY popular post, and many people asked for a copy of the spreadsheet to be emailed to them.
My husband finally got a few minutes to make this a clickable download; so try that first.
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If you want this template to use, leave a comment here asking me to email it to you. When you leave a comment, if you input it correctly in the form, I’ll have your email address. Don’t ask on the Facebook page or in an email to me — if we do it all here in the comments, then I’ll be able to keep up with who got it and who didn’t.
Pin ItLast year, I wrote about the budgeting spreadsheet that I created in Excel to manage my household expenses. This was an INCREDIBLY popular post, and many people asked for a copy of the spreadsheet to be emailed to them.
One of the first things I did was create a budget. I created a Microsoft Excel Worksheet and listed anything on which I would likely spend money: food, sundries, dining out, gasoline, etc. Once I did that, I figured what I might spend in a month’s time and set a budget. Once I had the monthly budget, I multiplied each number by 12 and came up with the annual budget. So, I created a worksheet within this spreadsheet that had the annual budget numbers. I work with an annual number, because, for instance, my birthday gift budget is $50 per month. However, there are months that I don’t spend $50, and there are months that I do spend $150 — but what I want to look at is the annual expenditures and budgets.
While the cost of everything seems to be going up, rapidly, I can tell you that my husband’s pay hasn’t gone up in the last year. NOT that I’m complaining. I’m SO thankful has has a job, locally, and isn’t having to work 8,000 miles away anymore. But, health insurance costs doubled (why is everyone so surprised that happened?), and his paycheck doesn’t stretch like it used to.
So, what are we doing to adjust to the higher costs of goods but the same pay? Here are just a few ideas:
Welcome to my weekly menu!
This week is going to be a low-key week for me. Because my 6-year-old was sick with the flu all last week, I lost a week of working (I don’t work when my kids are home). Thankfully, I’d had several blog posts already queued, so the blog went without a hitch. But, the surprise book I want to release on February 14th is really getting to crunch time. If you wanted a copy of my Budgeting Spreadsheet, make sure you leave a comment in the post. I also wanted to thank everyone for the amazing responses to With Fear & Trembling.
The “rules” of our household diet can be found in the tab above labeled Hallee’s Galley and further explained in Our Diet.
I usually serve leftovers for lunch the next day, or we’ll save them during the week to graze lunch on the weekends. We try to have a few meals a week vegetarian (see my post on eating meat) and eat fish at least one meal a week. One meal a week is usually a “Dinner Out” meal.
Almost all of the breads are homemade using fresh milled flour. I’ll continue to link to my recipes as I post them. Our daily bread is Whole Wheat Honey Oatmeal Bread.
Here’s the menu for my family for the week of January 14th. As far as desserts go, it’s rainy and cold outside as I type this, so that puts me in the mood for some sort of steamy hot fruit cobbler. I also made some Apple Fritters Sunday morning for breakfast. Oh my, they were good. Kaylee has asked me to add them to the standard weekly meal.
Gregg and I recently made a commitment as a couple and as a family to get out of debt. We have a number of motivating factors for this, but our primary motivation is because the less money we’re paying out to interest payments or what have you, the more we have to help further God’s kingdom.
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