$30 Was Completely Unrealistic
But, I knew that going into it. I only had $30 left in November’s grocery budget and a week more to shop for. Luckily, my utilities budget is $70 under budget for the month of November, so I knew I would be able to manage the inevitable grocery overage. And overage there was, for this week I spent $78.58 on groceries, $17.60 at Walmart and $60.98 at Aldi. I actually did not buy a single impulse item, so 0% of my budget for that. Heh.
I did stay ~$11 under my weekly grocery budget of $90, but I ended up about $48 over my monthly budget, or about $12/week over. That would bring my average grocery spending back up to about $102/week. Part of that was due to last week’s purchases for Thanksgiving dinner, and this week I spent about $12 on snacks for my son’s preschool class, for it is my week to provide them. I did stock up on a few things this month, and I have enough chicken in the freezer to last the whole of next month and a lot of turkey-related leftovers that should supplement quite a few meals in the weeks to come.
So, I think I will leave the grocery budget at $90/week for December as well. There are 5 Saturdays in December but we will be traveling to visit our families for a week around Christmas, so there will only be 4 shopping Saturdays for us. So $360 again for the grocery budget - and maybe next month we’ll actually hit it. I have to be judicious with my use of leftovers :).
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November 24th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
I’m sure the leftovers will help! There’s so many ways to be creative with them and find ways to stretch the meat.
And you didn’t buy any impulse items and came in well under the normal target budget, which was excellent.