Hubby's hours were cut...

Well, recently hubby came home from work with the news that his hours are being cut. The office has 3 clerks, one ended up getting a full time position (all three used to be part time) a while back, and while hubby's boss's boss is doing something else for the company, another guy is doing his job. On his first day he informed hubby's boss that the office was allocated fewer hours than it had been before. In fact, he tried to cut back the hours available to fewer hours than the office is open per week (not sure how that one was supposed to work!) So, it looks like for the forseeable future, hubby will be getting about 25 hours per week. For a long time, he's gotten close to, if not over 40 hours a week. The good news is, when we first made the move to this job and this town, he was promised between 20 and 30 hours per week, and that still was a better deal than his old full time job!

The problem being, we have grown accustomed to more hours...I no longer work part time...and we have one more mouth to feed than we did on the old job. So, we are trying to figure out what to do...

Of course, this major hours cut won't hit the paycheck for two more weeks, but yesterday hubby brought home his paystub, and it was several hundred dollars lower than his previous half dozen or so paychecks. So, we pulled out the old Dave Ramsey paperwork, and planned every dollar on paper, on purpose. (I have to admit that we should be doing that all the time, but we haven't been in 2008 at all...)

So, here's the fun part. I have $30 budgeted for groceries this pay period. Basically, that should keep us in milk...if I'm really lucky, I might be able to buy a dozen eggs as well. Fortunately, our pantry is pretty well stocked. We don't have much meat at the moment, but we do have our SHARE order to pick up this Saturday. Obviously all meals will be cooked at home.

Part of the reason the grocery budget is so low is that hubby and I are going to the Rocky Mountain Catholic Home Educators Conference in Colorado Springs in a week. Fortunately, we have already paid the conference fee and already paid for the hotel room (thank goodness for priceline...we got a two star hotel room with a kitchen for $34 a night!) So, we have to pay for food while we are there (we budgeted $50) and of course, a good chunk of money had to be budgeted for gas.

So, I'll be working on a two+ week meal plan, and I'll probably post it here sometime soon.