My love/hate relationship with groceries
Earlier this month I bought a whole lot of diet Mountain Dew when it was on a really significant sale. Enough, in fact, to last my spouse until the end of October. Until now I had just been absorbing the cost of the extra soda into my grocery budget for this month but I decided that was lunacy. The grocery budget is already such a mess and so overextended it can’t support such tomfoolery. So I have now allocated $20 back to this month’s grocery budget, and took $10 from September and October’s budgets. I will regret this by the end of September but something had to be done to slow the bleeding.
So, this week, I went grocery shopping, after allocating that diet mountain dew money back, with only about $88 left in my entire August grocery budget. I had a $75/week budget but every week this month it seems I went over for some reason or another. This week, I spent a total of $79.29, which is $4.29 over my target spending per week and only leaves $9.04 left in my August grocery budget for next week. That won’t be happening so all I can do next week is try to limit the amount it goes over I guess.
The spending broke down into $27.41 at Walmart and $51.88 at Aldi. I actually did not get anything I wasn’t planning on getting when I walked in the store at either place so, basically, what we consider our necessities were already 5.4% over budget. I am starting to believe that I will have to seriously re-evaluate the grocery budget by the end of the six month budgeting experiment. Maybe July being so close to budget was really a fluke after all.
~J
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August 19th, 2007 at 12:22 am
You know, I really think the price of groceries is going up dramatically. I went grocery shopping yesterday, and my bill was $75, and I didn’t even have to buy any meat! I was shocked!
How many people are you feeding on that grocery budget? I was going to try to get my budget down to $75 a week, but I’m having a hard time keeping it under $100.
August 19th, 2007 at 1:28 am
I feed 4 people, two adults, a 3 year old, and a 9 month old (who actually mostly still eats breastmilk lol), and two very fat cats. Well, only one is fat. But they both eat like it.
You are right that prices keep going up and my budget is kind of not equipped. I’ll probably have to up the amount. I wonder which other part of my budget is willing to take a paycut…. lol
August 19th, 2007 at 11:45 pm
Keep at it. My wife and I moved to a more expensive city last summer and we are STILL trying to figure out how to make groceries work within our budget. We have 2 kids to feed (3 & 1), and it seems like we are always ~10% over each month.
Eventually we’ll figure it out. (hopefully)
August 20th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
I turned my wife on to the Grocery Game http://www.thegrocerygame.com/
We are still in the 4 week trial period and haven’t actually done the math on it, but it sure seems like we’re saving tons of money. Every time she goes to the store for $70 worth of groceries she only ends up having to pay $40-$50. Check it out…
August 20th, 2007 at 3:38 pm
I’m a big fan of coupons. I also only eat what is on sale (and I don’t go to the store with a list). I also try to avoid name brand foods…store brand all the way. I’ve also tried to start cooking once, but eating twice (or three times)….