Grown-Up Things

Since being married, one thing is for sure. You have to do a bunch of grown-up things. They are things you never think about doing until you have to do them. Things like getting a joint checking/savings account, combining insurances, and changing your name. Oh dear—changing your last name is such a pain in the butt. You need a bunch of documents to change one thing and then that new thing to change another thing, and so forth. It’s weird because I don’t feel old enough to have to do all of these things. But it also feels good to have all that done and for everything to be official official.

Another grown-up thing I’ve started doing is meal planning. I thought I would maybe meal plan when I had kids, just to be organized and all that. But, honestly, I have started doing it simply to stay within the budget for food. I do a two-week meal plan (just dinners), and it obviously makes grocery shopping easy because you know exactly what you need. When we are at the grocery store, I keep track of the grocery list on my phone and Nate uses his phone to keep track of the costs of all the food. Seriously. We only budget $110.00 every two weeks for food, so sometimes we put something back so we can get some ice cream. Priorities people, priorities. Another thing we do to save a little bit of money on food is go to Aldi for some items. I didn’t want to go there for the longest time for whatever reason, but I finally went and discovered that it’s totally worth it for some things. They have a heck of a deal on chips, granola bars, NUTS (so much cheaper than the other grocery stores!), some really good deals on some fruits and veggies, and brie. We are still kind of learning what is worth getting there, but it seems to be helping with the budget. Then we obviously go to the main grocery store to get everything else. It’s not glamorous, but it’s necessary.