So I blew my food budget for the second straight month...

I'm kind of new to the whole budgeting thing. Can't say I'm an enormous fan of it, but it does give me a measure of control on my spending that I didn't have before and consequently keeps me honest about what money I do spend on things.

Well, except when it comes to buying food it seems.

Today I went grocery shopping for the first time this month. Crazy I know that I only went grocery shopping once this month but there were a lot of contributing factors that resulted in this, namely time, which I'll go into detail later. But at the time, all I knew for sure was that I had a mostly empty refrigerator and a huge list of food that I needed.

Well, turns out the lack of regular grocery shopping was not good for me or my wallet. I not only (rather stupidly) failed to keep track of the costs of everything I was throwing into my cart, I also failed to keep control of what it was I was buying.

Total damage: I spent $94 at the grocery store today. And blew my food budget for the month by about $12.

Now part of this is just simply due to bad planning, bad timing and frankly, laziness. To clarify, my food budget is not restricted to groceries but is meant to include fast food/restaurants I buy at work as well. Which is why I generally try to just grocery shop and make my own meals based on what I purchase.

However, I also began the month rebounding from a bad case of the flu. How bad? It affected my diet for weeks as my stomach seemed to have briefly developed a heavy dislike for nearly everything that wasn't fruit or chicken. Nevermind I was not in a physical state where I could cook or even be on my own two feet for long periods of time. So there was a stretch of time where I only ate fast food or expensive fruit cups.

Then I hit a stretch of days where I only got two days off in fourteen with all of them being late shifts, which generally discourages me from making grocery stops due to how late it is when I get off work. And with a rapidly depleting refrigerator and zero days to re-stock, led to another stretch of days where I only ate fast food once again.

It really isn't an excuse for me to have spent more than $200 dollars on food, but overall, October was a bad month for my money and my time, in that my time was limited and I was unable to optimize it in order to keep me out of McDonalds or other fast food options for my next meal.

The scarier part is, there was once a time not too long ago when I used to eat out EVERY meal too while at work.

Now don't get me wrong: my budget is still in the very early stages of its implementation, and I really have yet to tweak the totals in my budget in order to make it fit in with my current lifestyle.

In the same breath however, having budgeted $200 dollars a month for food, close to half of all my discretionary spending per month, I find it baffling how it is that I've blown past the total set aside not once, but twice.

And I have to buy some Halloween candy still too. *sigh*