Cut the Grocery Bill Challenge - week 4

It's Sunday night, the end of an expensive week. We're in the process of getting our house ready to put on the market. Seven years ago, when I put my townhouse on the market after a crazy staging frenzy with my mom, I vowed that NEXT time, I wouldn't wait until I wanted to sell my house to my make it all pretty. Yeah, well, NEXT next time... We actually started working on the house last summer and have done all sorts of things like landscaping, finishing the deck, painting, etc. Now we're in the final stages with getting a few new pieces of furniture, as well as pretty pricey renovation to our kitchen (putting in a hood over the range so the smoke alarm doesn't go off every time I cook, aka, every day!) and new carpet in the bedrooms. I hate spending the money, but love the way our house has come together.

One area where we are NOT spending obscene (to me) amounts of money is our grocery budget. I'm thrilled that we just bought our fourth week of groceries and are still under my goal of $400!

To recap:
Week 1: spent $6.02 $393.98 remaining
Week 2: spent $151.30 total spent: $188.57 $242.68 remaining
Week 3: spent $53.80 total spent: $242.37 $157.63 remaining

Week 4: spent $74.85 total spent: $317.22 $82.78 remaining

I'm not exactly sure why I still have another week left in March when I thought I started this challenge at the beginning, but I'll go with it, and add next week's groceries to this challenge.

I was reading on another blog that someone had a goal of $25 per person per week. For us, that would be $75/week, although one of those persons is only 2, so I think $60 is a better ultimate goal.

As I was tallying up the receipts tonight, I was thinking about how I could have saved more. I spent $5.00 in chicken broth this weekend. I know I should have been able to get it for no more than $4.00 if I had waited for a sale, and even less if I had coupon, but I had run out and since I'm having surgery on Tuesday, I knew I'd want soup. So, not smart shopping, but logical.

Another big expense this week was pine nuts. I LOVE pine nuts, they are a staple in several of our favorite recipes. But they are pricey. A few weeks ago I happily discovered that the organic section of one of our grocery stores sells them for $15.79/pound, which is decidedly less than the $26.95/pound we've been paying at our local farmer's markety place. Yeah, we loaded up today.

Cut the Grocery Bill Challenge - week 3

We're in the home stretch! We kicked off the month with a "Cut the Grocery Bill Challenge." To review, here are the rules for our new Cut the Grocery Bill Challenge.

• Our goal is $100/week ($400/month) for groceries only. We'll move on to household goods another time.
• We will start using cash to pay for groceries. It will be a little awkward, but we'll pay for the food items first, with cash, then any other items with our debit card.
• At the beginning of the month we'll take the full $400 a month out of our bank account, in order to take advantage of any surprise deals on our staple items.
• When the money is gone, we stop spending. This means that if we do find some great deal and spend ahead, we need to make sure to reserve money for our son's milk.
• Whatever money we have left at the end of the month gets deposited into our savings account.

We're doing great on the budget part, even though we haven't been doing well about the spend with cash part. I keep forgetting to go to the bank.

One discovery we made this week was Aldi's! We aren't bound to brands, so we were quite pleasantly surprised by what we found at our local store, and were able to spread out budget out a little farther.

Three weeks in, here's where we are:
Week 1: spent $6.02 $393.98 remaining
Week 2: spent $151.30 $242.68 remaining
Week 3: spent $53.80 $$157.63 remaining

I'm feeling pretty good about this, and think maybe our eventual goal of $300 a month is do-able.

Cut the Grocery Bill Challenge

Many moons ago, before my TBI, I followed Dave Ramsey's financial baby steps, and I'm so grateful I did. Before my accident, I was on step 3, building up an emergency fund of 6 months. I was already debt free except my house. Even though I still ended up losing everything, not having any other debt and some money in my account helped me make it a good while.

It's taken awhile to get back on my financial feet, and that's why I've been reading a lot of books on frugal living. It's not that I don't want to have fun or spend money, it's just that I want to be mindful on what I spend, so I can use our money for the things that are really important to us.

I've also been reading about healthy eating, so it's been interesting reading from two trains of thought. I could probably cut our grocery bill in half if I wanted to eat processed foods and meals in a box or bag, but quality food is important to me too and really, now that I have a fully stocked pantry and freezer, I can make most anything I want without having to spend much money at all.

I mentioned before that the average American family of four spends $771/month in groceries. Our family of 2 and a toddler spends about $500 a month, including diapers and household items. I think we can do better.

Last week, we didn't do any grocery shopping, other than 3 gallons of milk, for my son, since he doesn't get to vote in the family financial discussions yet. We spent $6. And we had more than enough good food for the week. Even more if we needed it. So we will continue our new tradition of shopping out of the pantry for the first week of the month. I think it will save us money and force us to be creative.

One of the discussions I frequently see on blogs that discussion average monthly grocery spending is whether or not the average amount includes household items or just food. I've been too lazy to separate them out, but I'd like to try to hone it on that for awhile.

So here are the rules for our new Cut the Grocery Bill Challenge.

1. Our goal is $100/week ($400/month) for groceries only. We'll move on to household goods another time.
2. We will start using cash to pay for groceries. It will be a little awkward, but we'll pay for the food items first, with cash, then any other items with our debit card.
3. At the beginning of the month we'll take the full $400 a month out of our bank account, in order to take advantage of any surprise deals on our staple items.
4. When the money is gone, we stop spending. This means that if we do find some great deal and spend ahead, we need to make sure to reserve money for our son's milk.
5. Whatever money we have left at the end of the month gets deposited into our savings account.

Here's where we are so far:

Week 1: spent $6.02 $393.98 remaining

Week 2: spent $151.30 $242.68 remaining

What kind of grocery challenges have you done?