June Finances

So here I am at the midway point of the year, looking at the groceries and household costs for June.

The happy couple

Ouch. June hurt. But it was pricier for the very best of reasons: we hosted a family wedding (my nephew and his bride) in our backyard on the very last day of the month. While we did not buy food for the wedding (the groom and bride did most of that), we did make and bring food to the family cookout the night before and hosted four house guests over part of the weekend, buying extra food to have on hand for them. I also bought some ingredients for making pesto, as the basil is going great guns in the garden this year. And some of that expense was the result of my apparently forgetting every math skill I ever acquired and miscalculating how many pounds of potatoes I needed to make potato salad for the aforementioned cookout. How many pounds of potatoes did I buy? A lot. How many? A. Lot. A small line item, in some ways, but I probably could have spent $6.00 total on potatoes instead of, ummm, about $15.00. 

So what are the June numbers? On groceries (food items): $247.19. Yeah, you read it right. Non-food household items (such as dish soap) were another $23.60, for a grand total of $270.29.

Ugh. I'm aiming at $175.00 combined food/household items per month. Clearly, I overshot that mark. However, the saving grace is that when I average the six months of 2018, my monthly average is $177.19, darn close to the $175.00 per month I have targeted. So I'm comfortable that I can come in around the $175.00 mark by the time I finish the year.

Because I am also committed to as little food waste as possible, I will be storing (carefully) or donating some of the excess to one of our local community players, a local church whose mission is feeding the hungry of our city. Those potatoes are NOT going to waste!

Eating out? $39.80 I can account for, and probably $80.00, estimated, overall. We had a trip to Chicago early in the month for the national conference of the League of American Orchestras. Conference included some stunning sessions on social justice, a couple of which left me reexamining my own commitment and my own work, both paid and unpaid. (Social justice and symphonic music? Absolutely.) The eating out figure includes our road trip expenditures coming and going. (In fact, the grocery figure above includes the trip to the Jewel-Osco in the neighborhood where we stay when in Chicago.) What the $39.80 does not include are two meals downtown during the conference. My guess is that for the two of us, they cost about $40.00 total, so the overall eating out cost is $80.00, not $40.00. Minus the conference, our eating out costs would have been $25.30, which is much more like it.

July holds a trip to Mayo Clinic, one which will stretch over a few days (the trip, not my Mayo appointment). We will be joining family and friends for much of it, and, of course, packing our meals for the trip up, so I'm hoping the overall impact is not too great on the food front. Given what we spent in June, I'm not sure we need to buy very much in July, other than perishables.

So that was June and the first half of 2018. Let's see what July holds.

A magical evening for all