July Budgeting Quirks

As one of my New Year's Resolutions, I wanted to stay in budget at least 4 months this year. Which should be easy, and yet ... we're in the 8th month and it's only happened once. Yikes!

July was particularly bad for a couple reasons. In the realm of personal spending, we both went to the dentist a few times. This is money that should be coming back to us from insurance (at least most of it), but we had to pay upfront and they wait a month or so and then reimburse us. For the house category, well, you've seen the fabulous deck. And in the miscellaneous and transportation categories, wedding-related expenses pushed us over the edge.

Strangely enough, the ONLY category in which we didn't blow our budget last month was groceries. I can't figure it out. We're generally TERRIBLE at sticking to the grocery budget. We've only stayed in grocery budget 5 of the last 12 months--and one of those was because we started shopping with a calculator and putting things back. That month we stayed within budget by a slim $1.74 margin.

And yet, by some miracle, in July we were under budget by a whopping $39. For us, that's huge! I'm wondering what made the difference. I don't think we ate out any more than usual, and we bought our usual foods too (not just 100 packets of Ramen noodles). We weren't out of town any more than usual (which is to say, we were still gone a lot).

I'm wondering if it has anything to do with the fact that I did a lot of the grocery shopping at the store that's on my way home from work. Is that store really so much cheaper? Or is it because I'm in a hurry so I don't throw as many random purchases into the cart? Maybe something about one person shopping instead of two--we can't talk each other into needless buys?

Obviously, it's too soon to say just based on one month. But I'm interested to see how August shapes up. And somewhat nervous--I'm already thinking about how I'm hosting writing group next Wednesday, people will be visiting the weekend after that, and of course we have to have a cookout! Maybe I'll consider myself lucky if we stay within grocery budget by $1.74 again.