Tightening up the budget

I know I'm not the only person to be actively looking for ways to tighten up our family budget in all categories. One of the ways we've been working on saving money lately is (of course) for food and household goods. I asked a friend of mine how she defined the grocery budget because I struggle a bit with that question myself. For example, how do you classify things like light bulbs, toilet paper or laundry detergent? For me, all of that gets lumped into the grocery budget.

That's not to say I get all those items at the actual grocery store--far from it. I prefer to do some price checking and then get those things where they are cheapest. The location varies so I have to stay on top of ads, coupons and circulars, but I think the pay off is worth it.

So with that big preamble, I've added a couple of new links to my Interesting Links section in the left hand navigation panel. You'll find a link for a blog called Cheap Healthy Good--my introduction to this very well-written blog was an article called 1 Chicken, 17 Healthy Meals, $26 Bucks, No Mayo, as well as another blog called Casual Kitchen (check out that article for starting a casual and inexpensive wine tasting club). If you have other blogs that fit in this general theme of saving money while living well, feel free to suggest them in the comments section.

In keeping with our tightened budget, today we saved about $2000. We'd gotten a bid for putting in under-cabinet lighting in our very small (8'x8') kitchen. That's serious money and while we desperately need the light, we can't justify spending that kind of cash right now. But the need for light is real, so today we picked up four GE Slimline fluorescent linkable plug-in fixtures for $76. Kent's installing them even as I type. I cannot wait to have a better-lit kitchen. While I would most definitely prefer them to be hard-wired to a switch, for the amount of savings I can live with this solution.