Feeding the Piggy Bank

We need to really fill our piggy bank (Savings). Just because we were eyeing (as in window shopping) for a new car, hubby finally look at how we were doing in terms of our monthly expenses vis-à-vis our savings. HA! He was a bit shocked of how much we are spending every month… ngayon lang nya naisip yun hahaha!

Most of the expenses are fixed and I really (for the life of me) can’t do anything about them. Unless I’m mistaken, then please leave a comment and share your tips with me. For example:

Yaya’s salary (stay-in)
*Maid’s ½ salary (sharing the cost with my mom)
*The maid is my mom’s. We just borrow her from Tuesday to Friday to help clean the house. We used to have one (my yaya’s younger sister) however, mas magulo pa ‘ata. Plus she was inexperienced and mostly rely on her Ate to help her. Dyus meh! I was sooo stressed having them together that we had to send her home na lang since wala rin naming natatapos sa house.
School Bus
Condo Dues
Cable
Gasul (almost every 2 months)
Rice (almost every 2 months)

Others are variable but amount have been pretty consistent, such as:
**Meralco (peg at Php2,500)
**Sometimes, it is lower. There are times na higher but mostly it plays around this figure.
***Water Bill (Php500)
*** Ewan ba, mataas talaga water bill sa condo namin!
****Globe Bills (Php1,300)
****Hubby & I are both under a 299 Plan. Kudos to hubby as in hindi tumataas bill nya ever ;) As for me, akin yung 1K a month…ewan ko ba! Maybe because I also use my personal phone for official calls and texts. If you think, pwede na ako dun sa Smart’s 999 Plan with a free iPhone noh? Last week, Globe offered me a discounted 299 unlimited call and text to Globe and Touch Mobile on top of my plan. I’ll see if it will make a difference and lower my bill further.
*****Gas (Php3,000/month)
*****It’s only recently that I have included this in our expenses.

Hubby was surprised that we were spending roughly Php13,000/month for grocery alone. But this will include Rafa’s milk and diapers. Imagine we are spending around 4K for 4 cans of NAN HW1 per month! That leaves 9K for the rest of the grocery. Next week, when we do our weekly grocery, we MUST limit it to what’s in my list – no to chips, cookies!

Also, we have started to just eat at home for lunch before doing our weekly grocery and be home in time for supper. Just like this Saturday when we went window shopping for cars. We left the house after lunch. We just had to stop-over S&R as Enzo was already saying he is hungry (around 5:30PM). Since we are on a tipid mode, we just bought 2 Baked Chicken Roll and 2 slices of Pizza to share among us - 5 adults & a kid. This is before we went to my uncle's wake then we went to Landmark Trinoma to buy the grocery. We went home right after and just enjoyed a home-cooked meal for dinner. We just stayed home the whole Sunday as our yaya asked permission to go malling in SM.

I do hope we can save quite a bit this 2012 compared to how we were in 2011.