Our Back to School supplies and clothes budget

Some of you are anxiously awaiting to see the school supplies we have bought for this school year.  Because I did not participate in the earlier back to school deals, we didn't do as well as we had in previous years.  But we stiill did OK and stayed within our budget.

Before we could do any back to school shopping, we had to see how much we could spend on school supplies and clothes.  I looked over our written budget to see if we had any wiggle room in our budget that maybe we could use for school shopping.  That didn't go too well.  We had a very hefty dental bill come in and that was eating any excess we had in our budget. 

Praise the Lord that my husbands commission check came in and it was more this quarter than last.  We sat down with our budget book and revised our budget to include the new amount of the commission check.  We were so excited that is until we got a letter in the mail about the high school marching band band camp- it was double what it was last year and the letter stated the money must be in 2 weeks later.  Write that down in the budget book- marching band is very important to Kevin.  Then it hit me~ we are going to have 2 kids in high school and in JROTC this year- YIKES!!  Thats 2 JROTC dues and 1 Freshman dues and 1 Sophomore dues- that is $100 all by itself.  Write that down in the budget book.  Plus baby Michael's ( I don't know why we still refer to him as baby Michael, my baby will be turning 2) birthday is in 10 days.  It was all adding up- how were we going to make this work. 

We sat down with our budget book and came up with a plan.  We were going to pay our bills as we normally do.  We were blessed that the commission check this quarter was more than last quarter and were able to pay for band camp, to get baby Michael birthday presents (on really good sales), JROTC & high school dues and still have $100 left for school supplies and new to them school clothes.

We end up with:
Dollar Tree
$1.00- freezer bags
$1.00- zip quart bags
$2.00- 2 boxes facial tissues
$2.00- 2 (5) ct highlighters
$1.00- dry eraser markers
$5.00- 5 boxes 20ct pencils
$12.20 with tax

Walmart
$1.48- 2 boxes colored pencils
$8.73- 9 packages tab dividers
$4.60- (5) 1" binders
$2.00- 5 bottles Elmer glue
$2.00- 5 packages Elmers glue sticks
$2.48- 600 index cards
$21.29- tax free weekend

Walgreens
$1.17- Wexford pencils
$0.78- PaperMate highlighters
$1.95- tax free weekend

Office Max- these trips were not made on the same day. I am just grouping them together.
1st trip
$.60- 3 containers of grips and erasers
$2.00- 75ct box pencils
$2.73 with tax

2nd trip
$0.60- 3 containers pencil grips and erasers
$0.30- 3 pkgs pecils
$0.03- 3 pks filler paper
$0.98 with tax

3rd trip
$1.50- 5 bottles hand santizer
$0.02- 2 rulers
$0.02- 2 boxes crayons
$0.20- 2 pks pencils
$2.00- 4 Composition notebooks
$3.82

4th trip
$2.00- 4 Composition notebooks
$0.02- 2 boxes crayons
$0.40- 3 pks pens
$0.20- 2 pks pencils
$0.02- 2 rulers
$1.00- 5 pks filler paper
$2.00- 2 boxes Kleenex
$5.74- Total with tax

08/22/2011
$0.42- Office Max- added 2 packs pencils and 2 packs crayons

My grand total for back to school supplies is........$49.13

Not too bad for school supplies for 3 kids.  This post turned out to be longer than I intended, so I will post about our school clothes deals later:)