“Budget Challenge: Reduce Food Spending by 10%”
Last week I shared with you all that I’m a compulsive spender. Looking at how I spend my money (thanks, Mint.com), I realize that the biggest chunk of money other than mortgage and daycare is food – groceries and eating out. Since this is an area of my budget that I have some degree of control over, I decided to give myself a challenge to decrease my grocery bill by 10% this month. Basically, it means I have about $120 a week to spend on groceries for a family of four. Yikes!
Groceries for a week
An easy way to do this would be to just subsist on Raman noodles and prepackaged foods, but I refuse to sacrifice my family’s health to save a few bucks.
My game plan before I headed off to the grocery store:
- Plan out meals for the week
- Make a list
- Keep a running tab of each item that goes into my cart
- Only buy what’s on the list!
It was kind of fun adding up the prices of all the items. The row of Halloween candy was pretty tempting as well as this New American salad dressing. What was that? I really wanted to buy some just to find out, although I didn’t even have lettuce in the cart to try it out on. Uh oh. My compulsive spender was rearing her head.
Halfway through the store, we were halfway through our budget. We were doing good. Then came the big ticket items – 8 9-volt batteries at $10, a package of diapers at $12 (but we used a coupon for $1 off), and my Kashi meals for lunch for the week at $15. Then we had to stop. We had reached $115 on my phone’s calculator. With tax, we were most likely already over our budget. We hadn’t bought dinner for the night, but we were going to stick with our budget.
Sticking to a budget
As the cashier rang us up, I was eyeing the cash register . $116!! Woo hoo! Not only did we stick to our budget, we came in $4 under. I was like, “Yeah, we have $4 for dinner!”
It felt really good as we left the store knowing that we had stuck to our budget. I have confidence now that maybe financial freedom is in my future, and a simple trip to the grocery store brought me one step closer. Let’s see if I can keep it up throughout the month!
COMMENT: How do your shopping trips turn out? Do you usually end up buying more than you should?
PLAY ALONG: Join us! Try to reduce your grocery spending by 10%. We’ll follow-up in a month to see how you did!
Good job on that grocery trip! And yes, planning out meals for the week makes a huge difference to the amount of money spent. Takes a bit of work, but I think it’s totally worth it.
You might be interested to know too that there’s a bunch of food bloggers participating in a month-long challenge to ‘Eat on $30′ every week for October ($30 per person per week) which sounds similar to your budget. Check out Running with Tweezers (http://runningwithtweezers.typepad.com/) or Use Real Butter (http://userealbutter.com) for their posts on the subject.
@Rachel: I can’t believe I spend as much on food as a family of four!
@Danielle: I think I need to take that $30 per week challenge!
Thanks, Danielle, for the info on what some food bloggers were doing. I checked out their posts, and it’s a really cool concept. One talked about realizing how much food we waste, and I couldn’t agree more.
Great start Rachel! My husband just recently lost his job from Whole Foods Market, where at least one of us has worked for the last 8 years with a NICE 20 % discount. Now that we don’t have that cushion, we are both a bit freaked out about how to continue to shop there or stores like it.
This gives me food-for-thought on how to reduce our spending at the store, while still keeping basket size up.
April, Sorry to hear about your husband’s recent job loss. I know it must be a stressful time for you both. Back to the grocery cart stuff, I think a lot of times we just throw stuff in there out of impulse rather than necessity. You don’t know how much I was craving a bottle of wine, but alas, I decided to drink the wine-turned-vinegar that has been sitting on my counter for two weeks instead. After the first glass, you kind of forget about the taste anyway.
April: OMG! That sux! I know it’s not the same as shopping in Whole Foods, but shopping at the farmer’s market is affordable. There’s one on Wednesday after work up at the Triangle OR Saturday morning downtown. There is also one coming to the East Side soon!