October was a great month for us in terms of reigning in our expenses. I finally realized how out-of-control my stockpile was getting and curbed my deal hunting a little bit. Our expenses were down in nearly every category, with the exception of groceries (needed to stockpile a few things here)and snacks (a difficult 3yr old led me to some stress eating. Blah).

Because I shopped less, I was a little lax about updating my coupon binder, so I didn’t use as many coupons either. (Gasp!). I still managed to shave $143.79 off our expenses with the coupons.

We had our annual meeting with our financial planner in October and the main mantra of the month was “Don’t panic.” We’re not panicky about the crazy market. We’re still on track for retirement. We’re still saving money toward our goals. We also decided to take a little more risk with our money since we have time on our side. We re-allocated some of our retirement funds to be a little bit more aggressive since so many funds have dropped in price. We also took a portion of our emergency fund from our money market account and put it in some CDs so that we could earn more interest on that money.

The annual check-up was good because it made us think about things like retirement, insurance, savings, investments, and our income. My blog is starting to make a little bit of money, and now that my husband’s book is out, we need to work on improving our management of our sidelines.

November will be a busy month with the holidays just around the corner. I’ll be making my shopping lists and holiday spending budget soon!

How was your month? Did you stay on track? What areas are you working on?