Goodness Gracious!

We knew it would be a challenge.  We knew that the D.C. area is an expensive place to live.  We knew that we would have to tighten our belts with that slash in income.  We knew that taking a D.C. post at the beginning of a Foreign Service career was an awfully expensive choice.

But goodness gracious, we did not know how challenging this would be!

I'll not get too far detailed, but here's the gist of it:

Rent is just over half of our monthly income.
We have no car payment.
After the non-negotiables like utilities, internet, and gas for the car, we are left with a very tight disposable budget.
Let me remind you - we have 5 people in our family, all of whom eat, one who still wears diapers.

We have a budget pretty well parsed out, which I'm patting myself on the back for having accomplished after less than 2 months in our home, less than 4 months in this country.

Here are the details:

We have budgeted $500 for leisure - that includes not only eating out, but also going to the pool or buying birthday presents.
We have budgeted $100 for extras - that has come to include hair cuts and wet cell phones.
We have budgeted $800 for groceries - that includes diapers and wipes, cleaning supplies, over the counter medications, and hormone-free dairy products for our growing young girls.

Its a change in lifestyle, but we can handle the leisure budget.  We eat out only once a week, and keep it in the $ category.  No $$ restaurants for this family.  Special treats are ice-cream and not-wanting-to-cook means hot dogs and chips.  This is all standard middle-class stuff.

But the groceries are killing us.  Who would have thought that a family of 5 would struggle to eat off of $800 a month?  A few tricks have helped - planning weekly menus to limit trips to the grocery store (easy), and cutting out organics (ouch!).  But they haven't helped enough.

So my project for the evening - plan out meals for the next two meals, and keep the entire grocery budget under $100.