Turns out I don't know how to budget

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What I've found helps us a lot is to keep track of how much things cost after the fact, figure out what a normal week's budget based of of what we have been eating costs, and then just check what the cost was after the fact for various amounts of food. Pre-budgeting is a lot harder than making sure to continue to be spending the same amount of money.

What my husband and I do is, plan what food you want to buy and have it be a necessity food, not a luxury food. Necessity food be things like food that is healthy for you, not desserts or junk food like TV dinners or hot pockets or pop tarts or juice.

Then we just buy the same stuff every time we shop. Sometimes we buy luxury food like we might get a dessert or we see something on sale we don't usually get and buy it.

Then look at how much you spent on groceries that time and then look at how many times you grocery shopped in one month getting food your body needs and add the totals together from the receipts and that will tell you how much you spend on groceries every month and make that your budget for food. (Tuttle pretty much said this already)

If there is anything you want to buy you don't usually get, put it on the shopping list and keep it on the fridge. Since you know you'd be spending more money on food that month when you do that, spend less money on things you want or things to do that costs money for that month.

I go the opposite way on this part, and add a small amount of luxury money into the budget so that I don't need to reduce the cost of the central healthy foods. If that's not spent one week it can be spent the next and so on.

This is true if you are impulsive. Which apparently your sister is.

If you end up spending roughly the same amount of money whether you buy food fortnightly, weekly or daily, it won't matter. I doubt you'll be able to save much at any rate.

If you can't afford to buy presents, perhaps you can do something creative. Whenever I forgot to buy people presents I would draw something for them. Maybe you could make something, or learn to cook something. I don't know. How much do they expect you to spend on each gift?

I haven't bought bread from the store in forever. I make ours at home now. Two loaves per recipe, I bake it every other day. Very cheap, easy and so much better. I'll give you the recipe if you want.

Frances

I usually eat the same food and it's all 'brain fuel' as I call it. Some of it is snacks because I need the extra calories but there's only 1 or 2 snacks.

I think my weekly shopping adds up to about $40. I'm not sure how to buy enough food to keep me fed for a few weeks. I'd have to buy every item that will last me 21 days. I mean obviously cereal, milk and rice lasts longer and I can sort of make chicken last over three days, but that's the way I see it - I have to have individual meals for each day.

The people I live with will sometimes offer me their meals and will take me shopping to the big supermarket but even then I don't know how to buy a lot of food and I don't even have enough space to store it. I wish I could do it on my own but I can't. I can't drive and really don't want to. I get too nervous in cars. I'm not very good at asking for help too. Honestly, the people I live with don't know how much I'm struggling. When they ask how I'm doing I end up lying because I can't tell them how hard everything has been. I've gotten over my social anxiety but I'm still having so many problems.

She doesn't seem impulsive. I'm impulsive. At least my fear of going broke keeps me from impulsive spending.
I'm already going to paint something for my niece's but that's going to take a lot of planning and I don't know if I'll ever get around to it.
I think I might just disappoint everyone this Christmas.

Hello Pensieve,

I didn't know you moved out and were living on your own now. Congratulations!

For the Christmas gifts, maybe you could take pictures of/for everybody, portraits or something else, and offer one to each of them? People are always glad to have good portraits of themselves or people or places they like.

It would be quickier than drawing.

(And I also noticed that at one moment, you talked about buying a bed for your cat?
But don't bother about that : the cats I've had slept everywhere but in their bed.
Actually, there was one of them who used to urinate on his cushion and I never knew why. I just had to take it away from him. So if you don't have much room, take off that worry from your mind.)

Best wishes

In my house there are just 2 people and I think we average somewhere between $80-110 on groceries per week.

We go grocery shopping once a week because that's how often our relative takes us. No one in my house drives.

I'm not sure I'd even know how to lower my costs much. Buying cheaper stuff won't help if it's stuff I can't make or won't eat.

Wow, I used to (sort of) have it together with regards to cooking, but have lost hold of it over the last several years. [Life events, ya know.]

Now I'm a middle-aged woman with two grown children and one half-grown, and I need to re-learn this food shopping/ cooking/ eating food/ cleaning up after cooking/ thing, all over again.

Re: the cat bed, because I evidently cannot answer a post without picking out and expounding on a less-relevant detail: I wouldn't bother. A dog might want a bed, but I don't think a cat does.

How long has your cat been sleeping in the cat litter? I think it could be a reaction to stress? She doesn't sleep in it when it's been used, does she? Have you tried taking her out and putting her someplace else (comfy) when she does that? It's kind of yucky, although probably no emergency... imo, it's probably a passing behavior.


In the meantime, I've been spending a fortune on food (it seems .... I haven't been tracking it because it hadn't occurred to me until reading this thread, ::sigh::)....

And yeah it's weird. My mother has it all down.... every, single, every single night when I was growing up, she would put dinner on the table consisting of a meat, a starch and a vegetable, for herself, my siblings and me.

Years have gone by without me making a "meal" that has more than one food to it. (This isn't one of those years, but it's still a rare occurrence.)

I think I was supposed to pick up the skills by osmosis, because she never spelled it out to me. Should she have? I'm sure it never occurred to her. I'm embarrassed to say this but I'm so bad at budgeting (and have less money to work with than I'm used to) .... my mother has gotten in the habit of calling me up & questioning me on the contents of my bank account, the bills that are coming up due, etc. ~~ and more often than not, these conversations lead to her depositing money in my account. This makes me feel bad, because it's one thing to waste my own money but quite another when I'm mismanaging the money someone else has managed to accumulate for herself.

How is it even possible that I'm a "middle-aged woman" at all? Aren't I ever going to get the chance to feel like a grown-up in this life?

Currently my cat is sleeping next to the basket I gave her to sleep in. Inside is the pillow case she has been sleeping on for a few weeks. It used to be on my bed but now it's hers.
She slept in the litter as a kitten, after she got over sleeping on stoves. She likes course textures.
Well, I found her sleeping in her litter after I came back from visiting my sister, though she did stink a few days before that. I just never put the two together. I think she is struggling to find somewhere to sleep and to call her own. I have made it clear I don't want her on my hard drive, especially after the whole litter thing.

My mum called up to apologise. She is going to help me out. I really don't want to say anything against her because she is the only one who knows just what I'm going through. She knew from a very early age that I was different and I think she protected me for too long from growing up. I don't blame her, I was a stubborn child who needed a big push but the type of push people are giving me these days is just too much to deal with.
My sister says I'm making excuses. By saying that she is saying everyone with executive dysfunctions is just making excuses.
My other sister (I live with) tries to twist my mum's words to fit her own meaning which is in denial I have any problems. I'm a good pretender and I can't share my honest feelings because it gets really hard to get the words out without crying or screaming. She keeps talking to me about brilliant people who have been diagnosed with many things and have denied it and just gotten on with their life. If I just forgot my diagnoses and tried to get on with my life I would never leave my bed which is basically what I did today. She thinks I'm brilliant too which I kind of agree with (I've got skills but am no savant) but I need to be motivated and organised to do anything and that requires medication she thinks I shouldn't be on. I've probably already said if I didn't have my medication I'd just give up.

She at least wants to take me shopping and offer me cookbooks. She might just get a taste of what my executive dysfunction can be like.

I don't blame her either. She is trying, it's just her anti-psychiatry stance is not helping matters, in fact, it's making them worse.

I do like Sydney (since I no longer have debilitating social anxiety) and I want to explore the towns and city (more the towns), I've just struggled so much. It's more in the form of breakdowns, panic attacks, seizures and shutdowns. I've tried to hold the meltdowns in because I never feel like I'm alone in the house even when people have gone.

One thing that made me happy tonight (apart from mum calling me) was that because I know dogs can sense seizures the little pup here jumped up on me and lay next to me. He had been very standoffish around me so I'm glad he did that. I like snuggling up to dogs.

Hi pensieve, I'm glad your mother called, and that you're feeling a tiny bit more hopeful.

After your warning I'm reluctant to offer (unasked for) advice. I wondered whether you had ever thought about what constitutes a (balanced) meal, and maybe that causes the grocery shopping problems?

I'm NT and the only way that I can come up with a successful shopping trip is to have a meal plan for the week and then buy what I need to make those meals. Otherwise I will come home with lots of random stuff that doesn't add up to proper meals.

I do one big shop a week and then top up if the milk runs out or something. So my meal plan is for seven meals at a time. Happy to tell you more if you can't ask your family (always assuming they can construct proper meals).

I don't think it's I don't know how to have a balanced meal, rather I don't know how to arrange for many balanced meals. This is what I'm finding difficult as I write my shopping list. I'm just thinking about what I've run out of (chicken, bread). I still have one tin of soup, one of baked beans and a couple pasta packets, as well as plenty of cereal and maybe enough milk. I'll have someone helping me now which is good.

I think I need to think ingredients. Lettuce, tomatoes, avocados. I think I've been too dependent on others to buy this stuff. And I need to select my own fresh vegetables and see if this works out cheaper than frozen vegetables.

I'm slowly working this out. At least people know I get so nervous I have a gigantic meltdown on Facebook over it. I feel kind of ridiculous about it but that could because I just took medication.

I'm at a loss when it comes to herbs and spices and sauces.

For herbs and spices and sauces, right, start off with simple premixed spices. Like here, we got many Puerto Ricans, so Goya Adobo is super cheap, and you can use that to flavor stuff. Basically, what I do is, with my mother at the grocery store, most weeks, I'd throw in a 69c dried spice container in the cart, after a few months, my kitchen is fully stocked. A lot of the time with me, though, I'd read recipes I wanted to make online, and then buy spices later and do the recipes if I didn't have the spices. Spices usually keep a decent amount of time, and yeah.

For my recommendations, I'd start off with some garlic, either fresh or dried, dried is good to have on hand, though, in case your fresh garlic has gone bad. Then just black pepper, salt, cumin, and chili powder will pull off most stuff. But the only way to be sure you got the spices you need is just to research recipes online, and formulate a plan of things you'd potentially like to try making, then buy the spices to make said recipes. Herbs and spices I believe are everything, though, they make and break dishes, they're awesome.

Some things, though, you're best off buying mixes until you learn the correct things, or the "correct" way is too much of an inconvenience of getting all the right ingredients at a time and using them, etc.

One thing I can recommend trying that helped me in my cooking exponentially. They're gonna have all the "ethnic" food (or at least I) dream of cooking, all right there in one spot, usually for a good price, as they're having to cater to their own people. But like, if you wanna cook pad thai, you'll find pad thai paste, pad thai noodles, all the vegetables, etc, for a very cheap price. Something to consider. Plus, people at said ethnic market are usually foreigners and I find them very friendly and nice and easy to be at ease around compared to Americans. Sometimes too, they'll cut you deals on stuff, round off prices if you don't got money, etc. Cool stuff.

But really, cooking just takes lots of practice. It's not magic, but it's usually easier than you think it is. I learn to sorta kinda multitask while cooking, you can chat on aim, post on WP (haha), put on an album, talk on your phone, etc. I mean for me, multitasking comes pretty hard, but I learned to do it to a small degree while cooking.

Thanks. We're pretty multicultural in Australia and I find those people nicer than say a bored white teenager. People are usually nicer to me because I've got Indian in me.

I'll try online again. There's just so much to choose from.