The send week of the $25 Per Week Budgeting Challenge was a lot tougher than the first week.  Maybe I was getting cocky, but this week we really started to feel the squeeze.  This week also contained Valentine’s Day, which meant I had to make some hard choices.

Our family has a 18 year tradition of going to Kentucky Fried Chicken on Valentine’s Day.  My husband and I spent our first Valentine’s Day at KFC when we couldn’t get seated at any other nice restaurant back when we were in collage.  It sorta became a running joke and we have done it every year since.  Now we take our kids (which means they have spent every Valentine’s days of their entire lives there!)

By Tuesday I didn’t have any money left in the budget, and we talked about not going to KFC, but we couldn’t pass it up.  So instead I decided to float the cost of dinner to next week’s budget.  Thank goodness KFC is really affordable and we didn’t have a tradition of $100 steak house dinners on Valentine’s Day!  Because of that we will still have a little money for next week!



I pushed off getting gas and groceries as long as I could, and ended up blowing through the budget in one trip. I am ALREADY out of milk again, but since we are out of money, I’m waiting until Thursday to buy some more.  I did splurge on some sweets this week ($2.00 worth of bulk chocolate), since right now it is Girl Scout cookie season in our house and it is taking every ounce of will power to not drop 20% of my weekly budget on some Thin Mints.

Meals this week also took a nose dive. It isn’t that there isn’t good food in the house, but I’m tired of cooking and washing dishes. One night was ‘fend for yourself” night where the kids ended up having cold cereal or pancakes.  (Hence the reason we polished off so much milk.)  I still have plenty of proteins in the freezer, but I’m feeling uninspired.  There were a lot of ethnic meals this week, mostly because I had them in pre-made in the freezer and they were easy to heat and serve.  Potstickers, Taquitos, Pasta..

In case you wondered what our REAL pantry-only meals looked like this week these are the dinners we had:

Wednesday:  Potstickers and Green Beans


Thursday:  Grilled Chicken Skewers with Bacon and Balsamic Brussels sprouts


Friday: BLTs (I picked up most of these groceries at the store on Friday)


Saturday: Spaghetti Marinara


Sunday:  "Fend for yourself night”  The kids picked what they wanted, chicken nuggets, pancakes, cold cereal and my husband had a can of soup.  I don’t actually recall what I ate. I think tortilla chips and a beer.  #KeepingItReal

Monday:  Chicken Taquitos with Mexican Rice & Beans


Tuesday:  Fried Chicken at KFC.
We ended up splitting two $5 Fill Up Boxes and 2 kids meals between the 5 of us, which kept the bill under $20