End of the Year Numbers & 2012 Goals
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Here is my year at a glance for 2011 – I’m very proud of these numbers and excited to share, but honestly I’m looking forward to beating them in 2012! I’d like to thank Angela at The Coupon Project again for putting the spreadsheet together that I’m using. I’d highly recommend that you download Angela’s new updated version of the savings tracker spreadsheet for my favorite price – free!
This year we bought $14,010.39 worth of products for only $2,933.86, or 80% off. Take a look at the ‘coupons’ and ‘discounts’ columns and you’ll see that the $11,154.58 that we saved was approximately half from coupons and half from sales. That shows that you can save 30-50% without clipping a single coupon if you simply buy things when they’re on sale, and buy enough to keep you until the next sale. So how much you want to save and how much time you want to spend are completely up to you, but you CAN do this!
For 2011 we set a budget of $375 per month for our family of seven, plus two cats, one dog, and 11 fish. That’s $87/week ($4,500/52 weeks) or $12 per person, which we felt was reasonable and would maybe even allow us some room in the budget to expand our stockpile. I’m thrilled and more than a little surprised that we’ve actually spent an average of just $56/week for all of 2011! Even though that’s just a little over $8 per week per person, I’m going to budget $3,600 for the new year, $300 per month or around $70 a week. That will provide us a little bit of a cushion and will allow for occasional “splurges”, plus it’s 20% lower than last year’s budget. Considering that we used to spend around $325-350 a WEEK, I’m super excited to know that we can easily live within our new monthly budget of only $300 a month!
I’m also very excited to be participating in the Boost Your Budget Pantry Challenge in January where we’ll be eating as much as possible from our freezer and stockpile and keeping our shopping expenses to a bare minimum so we can start the year out right with lots of room to spare in the monthly budget! Please join us in January if you’d like to do the same!
Wow that’s awesome! Thanks for sharing your great savings for the year. Good luck in 2012!
Thanks so much and Happy New Year! Come save with us in 2012
That is amazing!!!! Wow! Good luck for ’12!
Thanks Aly! I’m excited about saving in the new year
Hope you have a healthy and prosperous new year!
Wow! That’s a good deal of savings! My goal is to save more in 2012.
Hello there- thank you for sharing this!!! I was trying to download the saving tracker spreadsheet but could not do so~ I’d really love to use it.
Thanks again.
I love this savings tracker and don’t know how I got along without it
Could you try right clicking on the link once you get to the download page, then select “save target as” to save the file to your computer? That should do the trick.
Thank you so much for providing this worksheet for us to use. I was thinking of making something similar, but yours is much better than one I would have come up with.
Thanks Annie! Same here! I was going to make my own but this one from my friend Angela at The Coupon Project is much better and I love it – this will be my third year using it
Enjoy!