My Favorite Things - Food
This has worked really well for us so I'm sharing it in case it's helpful for anyone else.
We have a family of 6 and thanks to growing appetites and inflation, our "Food - Eating In" (i.e. Grocery) budget is stretched pretty thin. Thanks to Simplifi, I can easily keep track of our spending from year to year to year!
Thing #1 - Over two years ago, we did one of the best things we've ever done with our food budget by switching to a Cash Envelope system for groceries. While it's a work in progress and drastically underfunded, it has greatly helped.
Thing #2 - Around five months ago, we did the second best thing we've ever done with our food budget by creating a completely separate checking account JUST for "Food". Each week, I have a transaction scheduled at the bank to go from my "Primary CHK" to this separate "Food CHK" account. This steadily builds up the balance throughout the entire month in smaller increments which are easier to fit in with other bills. Then, at the beginning of each month, we withdraw one large amount from "Food CHK" to put in our "Food Cash Envelope". All the various automated transactions are saved in Simplifi as Recurring Series and pretty much everything is automated!
Added bonuses:
- This protects and segregates our critical food money from the rest of our random spending.
- This lets me see the Projected Balance of just our Food CHK which then lets me make minor tweaks to my Recurring Series to see the effects. For example, we were able to squeak out a bit more money solely by looking at the projected balance 3 months out.
- Since the scheduled transfers occur every week and some months have 4 weeks and some have 5, your Food CHK account gets an occasional extra nudge! This is largely why we were able to increase the monthly amount designated for our Food Cash Envelope.
- This let us move the money to a more hyper-local bank - just 2 blocks away - which makes it more convenient to withdrawal money for the Cash Envelope.
Chris
Spreadsheet user since forever.
Quicken Desktop user since 2014.
Quicken Simplifi user since 2021.
