I have spent 2 years now ruling my financial life with an iron fist. Okay, so the fist has an iron core and has a healthy coating of the padding that Nerf toys are made of, but for the most part, I’ve been living well within my means and debts I’ve taken on in short term have been turned around in minimal amounts of time and financed under very good terms (0% interest for the most part.)
That said, there’s the section of the budget that’s really hard to get a firm grip on: food, household supplies, pharmacy, personal care and in some cases, clothing. The problem is not spending too much on these items, it’s getting a firm handle on exactly how much is spent on a monthly basis in these categories.
The fly in the ointment is the dreaded “hypermarkets” of Wal*Mart and Target. Most of the stuff I get in those categories comes from one of these 2 places now that I’m out in the suburbs. While I’ve been haggling to get the food portion of that clump out by getting in the occasional trips to Stew Leonard’s in Yonkers and the clothing portion is very haphazzard (I can get just about anything I’d get at either Wal*Mart or Target in the “cheap everyday clothes” category at Sears for a slightly higher price) there are things that we get that we just need now and don’t have the energy and patience to run around to different stores to get.
Remembering to set the receipts aside and then itemize them out in my budgeting software is a royal pain in the ass and in the rush of life some of these get lost in the shuffle and I end up with the dreaded “Shopping (other)” entry in my budgeting software and I have no idea how much was for each of the categories. It annoys me since I’d really like to know just how much we’re spending in each of those categories so I can factor out what a total budget looks like since we don’t have to buy a pair of pants, a jumbo size bottle of laundry detergent or face scrub every month. We do have to get milk, fruits and veggies, and other foodstuffs at least every other week.
The reason for this complaint is it’s just more convenient when I forget I’m running out of something to run to one of these places and grab it. Wal*Mart usually has the better prices but Target is closer to home. Wal*Mart is 24 hours so we can go when it’s less busy at 11pm but then we remember it’s dreadful since they shut down all but 2 registers and we spend as much time standing in line for checkout as we do shopping.
I’d like to move the personal care and pharmacy category off the clump and just preplan and shop for things through drugstore.com and purchase 3 month supplies at a time so it becomes a quarterly number but for some things, Wal*Mart just has better prices.
These dreadful places are just not going to go away so I guess I’ll have to suck it up and live with the clump of “Shopping (other)” *gag*