I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…

May Grocery Challenge Update

There are 5 shopping weeks in May for me, and I entered Give Me Back My Five Bucks’ grocery challenge with a goal of spending $435 or less on groceries for the month of May ($85/week plus $10 for my son’s snack week at preschool).  A few weeks ago, I found a great deal on Balance Bars for my spouse, and spent $50 more than I budgeted for May on them (but we’ll be all set for many many weeks now!).  So, well, that went out the window.  But I am still trying to keep the shopping total as low as I can.  So this week, my goal was to spend $80 or less on groceries (since I bought Balance Bars already, I’ve knocked $5 off my weekly budget goal).   It doesn’t help that the price of groceries keeps going up each week, but I am trying to economize as best I can.

This week, I spent $44.98 at Aldi, $27.13 at Walmart, and $8.05 at Kroger for a total of $80.16.  Yes, overbudget but only by $0.16 so I am pretty happy with that.   However, that only leaves about $2 in my budget for the month of May for groceries, because of the Balance Bars as well as generally going over my budget the past few weeks.  I don’t see that happening, but I am going to try as much as possible to live out of our freezer and pantry for the next two weeks and buy as little as possible.  To that end, I thawed a pork roast I had in the freezer and cooked that up today, it provided dinner for my spouse and kids tonight, and will be dinner tomorrow night as well as at least one lunch if not two this week.

So, we’ll see.  I’m pretty happy with how I did this week, and if I can limit next week to $50 or so I would be pretty happy with that.

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