The household budget and the grocery shop, with everyone in on it
The daily figure you worked out last lesson runs easily for one person. In a house with three or four mouths, the largest item below the line is the grocery shop, and the main reason it runs away is that one person carries the budget in their head while everyone else spends. This lesson gets it out of your head and onto a sheet on the fridge, and into a list before every trip to the shop.
What you'll have at the end
A weekly grocery cap, a list written at home before leaving, and a way of making the children part of the budget.
Step one: take groceries out of the daily figure
Groceries don't suit a daily sum because they arrive as a weekly lump. Take the food spending from your logging month in lesson 2.1 and divide by four. If the month was 2,400 AED, the week is 600. That's the weekly grocery cap, and it comes off the daily figure up front, leaving the daily figure for the rest: transport, eating out, whatever turns up.
Step two: write the list before you leave, and cap it
The most dangerous sentence in a supermarket is "let's see what we like". The list is written at home and the amount is fixed before the door: "today, 400". In the shop you walk the list and leave. Whoever walks without a list comes out with double the amount and finds at home they forgot the eggs.
A list on the fridge works, and a scrap in your pocket works. In Fawatery the list is written on the phone, sorts itself by the shop's aisles, and is priced from your own past prices before you go.
Step three: take the children to the shelves
Children's money habits are formed and settled before about the age of seven, so what you do in front of them at the shop lasts longer than anything you tell them at home. Three exercises that work every time:
- Hand them the list and the amount, and when it won't stretch to both the washing-up liquid and the chocolate, make the decision theirs, and name it: everything you buy is something else you won't.
- Stand in front of two near-identical products, one pricier because it advertises on television, and ask which one to try this time.
- At the exit, hand them the receipt to check against the bags. A 250-dirham receipt checked by a nine-year-old is a lesson they don't forget.
Step four: make the budget visible to everyone
A couple arguing over spending in front of the children hands them a fear of money that stays for twenty years. The fix is a budget that isn't a secret: the grocery cap written on the fridge, and what's spent from it logged somewhere both partners see. When each logs from their own phone the name sits beside the expense, and "who bought this?" ends before it starts.
Step five: review the week in five minutes
Friday or Saturday evening, open the week: what was the cap, what went, where's the gap. No lecture, no blame. If the gap is 120 the only question is where from, and it's usually a second trip to the shop "because we forgot something", which the list fixes.
Where most people trip
In the first month, when one partner tries to impose the budget on the other. A budget one person sets and the other is expected to keep lasts two weeks. Sit for one hour together to set the weekly cap, and after that nobody has to impose anything.
Tonight's exercise
Work out the weekly grocery cap from your logging month. Write it on a sheet on the fridge. And write next week's list now, before anything runs out.
Questions I get asked
My wife does the shopping and I don't know what she bought, where do we start?
She writes the list and sets the amount, and logs from her phone. You see the statement, and leave it there. Anyone who wants to inspect it line by line breaks the whole arrangement.
The children ask for something in every aisle.
Give them a small line of their own on the same list, 30 dirhams say, to choose what they want with, and the asking stops. Lesson 7.2 goes into this.
Our groceries vary a lot week to week.
Take a monthly cap instead if the swing is large, but split the trips: four big ones a month, not twelve small ones.
Write the week's list in Fawatery and it sorts itself by aisle, prices itself from your own history, and is logged as one purchase when you leave the shop
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Based on: "The little millionaire: how to teach your children to manage money".
That's the end of module two: you know where your money goes, how much you can spend each day, and how to run the biggest item in the house. Module three starts with what's above the line, and the heaviest thing there: instalments.