What Goes Down Must Come Up
So far, buying groceries according to my spouse’s specific meal plan has been… interesting. I think, in the long run (once the 12 week meal plan is over), it will only add $10-20 a week to the grocery bill. Or at least, I hope so - but it isn’t blind hope, I have been paying attention to what types of things go on sale that I can plan meals around in the future. Really, all the fish is killing the budget. But, after the meal plan is over, I doubt my spouse will eat fish 4 times a week. He’ll be eating more fish than he had been (not hard to increase from zero) but I can also buy frozen fish on sale. This week Kroger had frozen cod and salmon on sale, so I bought some. But since he hasn’t tried either cod or salmon yet, I couldn’t buy a huge amount. If I knew he’d eat it willingly, I could have really stocked up.
This week I spent $78.47 at Aldi, $18.51 at Walmart, and $11.82 at Kroger for a total of $108.80. Kroger was mostly frozen fish on sale as well as frozen whole turkey breasts on sale (a few of my spouse’s lunches have turkey breast with them). The big spending was at Aldi, and that is because they had a canned Minestrone soup as a special item last week, and my spouse liked it much more than the Campbell’s version. The stats were almost identical, so I bought ten cans of it this week (special items are only available for a limited time) to last the rest of the meal plan (he has one can a week for lunch). So that was $14.90 more than I would have spent otherwise. We’d also run out of a lot of “plastic” items all at the same time (ziploc bags, freezer bags, trash bags) so that added a bit extra to the bill.
It wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t great either. I’m already $25 over my monthly grocery budget and we have a week to go. Eeek! I’m averaging about $105/week for these three weeks so hopefully I can get that down a little next week. Or down a LOT. One can hope. 
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February 16th, 2008 at 6:11 pm
I’m thinking of moving onto a 12 week meal plan from March onwards as I’m finding sticking to my grocery budget difficult at the moment.
I’m hoping it will give me more scope to bulk buy products.
I’m also willing to try anything to reduce the costs.
February 16th, 2008 at 7:04 pm
Yeah, fish is certainly more expensive than a lot of meats. I don’t think we’ve bought it since we were married. Frozen might be cheaper, but if we don’t HAVE to eat it then we might as well not go with the second best and go with chicken or beans.
Good luck!
February 16th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
I can’t even tell you how impressed I am that you are able to put all of this additional effort into cooking/preparing special meals for his plan. Healthy is good, but I can barely muster three “cooking” meals a week for myself, sheesh!
You are a better woman than I!
February 17th, 2008 at 11:51 am
So he has set meals every week? I can see hoe that would increase your budget since you can’t really shop around sales. I don’t know if you have Costco around you, I found frozen mahi mahi there for $4.99/lb, not too bad I think. One positive thing about this meal plan I assume is that it probably sets portion sizes as well, or not?
February 17th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
What types of fish have you had success with? My wife has been considering adding fish to our diet for the potential health benefits but neither of us are fish eaters. I’ll eat it when I go to the beach but it is normally heavily spiced (creole or blackened) or sauced with Alfredo or other unhealthy stuff. We already spend $100/week for groceries so it may even lower our bills by reducing our preprocessed, frozen meals. Any advice you can give would be great. Thanks.
February 18th, 2008 at 11:40 pm
@ Adfecto - just canned tuna so far
Flounder is just ok, the next few weeks I’ll be trying some other ones so I’ll post back then.
February 19th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
@ Adfecto - Pacific Salmon is much better than flounder. I think I’d like it as much as tuna if it was fresh and not frozen (some bites were really good and others kinda, well, fishy), but where we live fresh isn’t going to happen