Keeping a Grocery Budget on Excel

One thing I was NOT when I got married to my husband was organized. The one thing that annoys me the most and helps me the most is his organization skills. This extends to budgeting the monthly grocery budget and list. He has a system and I think it is great. It has truly helped our family out a bunch. Getting started takes a bit of work but it is worth the effort. You need a place to keep receipts and an excel-type program on your computer. Here is what we do.

In order to get started, the first month you need to…

1. Keep every single receipt we get from every purchase. I found an old school crayon-supply holder of my daughters and set it in the kitchen. Then every time the family buys something, as far as groceries go, we stick the receipt in the box.
2. Go through the box at the end of the month. My husband calculates the total we spent on groceries for that month and writes it on the top of an excel sheet.

Then my husband went even further and this step is what has really helped with organization and saving money.

3. Make a list of commonly bought items. For instance with five girls we drink a bunch of milk and applejuice. Those are always on our list. This list is now my shopping list. I can print this blank sheet out and use it to remind me what to buy at the store. We have also posted a copy in our cupboard to keep track of what we normally have stored, but that is for another post.
4. My husband also has calculated, from the previous months receipts, how much milk we are using, for instance. Or, how many diapers we used and how much we spent. This led me to switch to cloth diapers. I have also cut down on the amount of orange juice we are buying because no one is drinking it and we are not buying frozen, we are buying it in the container. No sense wasting something we do not drink. So, I changed the required number of OJ to buy on the shopping list. That way if dear old hubby goes to the store for me, he will not buy as much.
5. The next step really takes extra work but again, if you are on a really tight budget, it is worth it. We shopped at two different stores and bought the same, or basically the same brand milk. Then we compared the prices. There is also occasionally in our newspaper an article about milk prices. We therefore know which store to buy our milk in. Every cent counts in a house with five girls. Especially with as much milk as we drink! Well, baby Sarah drinks Mama’s milk but her time is coming!

Now, this may seem really like penny pinching and too much work but after the initial set up on excel, it is smooth sailing from then on. Now we simply keep the receipts and do a monthly tally. We then know if our money saving efforts have worked for the month. If there is a drastic change in the total for the month, my husband looks through the list and sees what happened.

Update and Thank yous!!

The last two weeks have been very stressful in our home. We have come forward with this situation and I want to take time to thank you all for helping us so far. I want to address a few questions you have asked about our situation. I also want to tell you how far we have come and what we are still trying to do. So, bear with me and read on to find out what has happened to the Meyers.

· We have received many great donations from people all over the US, including people I have never met. This has lifted my spirits up so much and given me hope. I received donations from strangers, my uncle, my aunt and her mother, my cousin, old friends, an old boss, old students from LCU, another mom from the CP website, and many other people who just heard about our situation from the website. I am trying to email everyone individually but it will take me a few days. I am currently sharing the computer with my teenage daughter and with the other four girls around, there is not much time.

· I received one email asking why we are asking for our donations to be sent to an American address and account. That is because I still do my banking in America and it would be easier for us to get the money from my debit card here than have American friends trying to send things to Germany.

· Another friend asked if it was too late to send donations. NO, it is not too late.

· We have approached the firm that provided the nursing services last year and given them what we have collected so far. We still do not have the complete amount to pay off the bill but I am hoping this will buy us a few weeks time.

· People have asked me why we do not just get a lawyer and sue the insurance company. There are several reasons we are looking at.
1. The company found a nice little loophole and said they do not have to provide the type of care we received while I was pregnant. There are different words for different kinds of care given to sick people in the German insurance language. They told us that what we received was not what they covered in the insurance. Then they pointed to the city and told us to contact them. The city said the insurance should pay for it and we needed to work on their interpretation of the wording. This game of pointing fingers went on during the whole pregnancy.
2. We cannot bite the hand that provides for Kelly. We just checked with a social worker familiar with the law and they think that it would be very difficult to sue the insurance company. The other problem would be that if we attack the insurance company, and we later need them to approve something for Kelly, then we have bitten the hand that feeds us and may be denied for something important.
3. So, we would have to sue the city of Barsinghausen. We could do that and still may but if we do not pay this bill ASAP, it will not matter because we will lose everything anyway.

· I know many, many families in the US with children who suffer from CP or other medical conditions who have the same problems. Medical bills that the insurance will not pay. Insurance companies are evil. The difference is that the families in the US can ignore their bills for years and no one comes and takes their house or job away. I live in a foreign country where things are different. In America the other parents with CP children have had fundraisers done for them in their hometowns to raise money for bills, or new therapy or equipment that the insurance will not pay. People give them money and participate in the fundraiser and never once tell the people that they should just get a lawyer.

· So why not do a fundraiser here in Germany? Those are not common at all here. People give once a year around Christmas to big charity foundations. The social worker we are speaking with is trying to get us funding through one of these foundations. We will apply for something next week.


Please believe me that we are trying everything we possibly can to take care of this situation. I have thought about doing some type of craft and selling it on the internet. It is all a matter of timing and funding. At the moment we have done what we can for the short term and it is a matter of waiting and seeing what happens. Please keep us in your thoughts and prayers.

Janette and the Meyer Family