I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…

July Is The Month I Stay In My Grocery Budget (I Hope)

I’ve kind of fallen off the wagon as far as analyzing my grocery spending in detail and posting about it.  I was kind of bored of having nothing interesting to say about it - I was behaving for the most part and limiting any impulse purchases.  Then June came.  Somehow, without noticing, I went more than 20% over my budget.  There were reasons I can cite, and rising prices, but I do think part of it was not feeling quite as accountable for my grocery spending as I had the past year.  Things are improving for us - we’re closer to being out of debt, both my spouse and I have increased our income, and there is a bit more wiggle room in our budget.  But letting our spending creep up and up just because we can will put us in a similar place we started - spending all the money we have and not feeling like we can do anything more than get by.

So I’ve made some adjustments - first I took much of the wiggle room out of our budget by setting a very ambitious goal for getting out of debt.  The goal I set on the blog was adjusted from December 2010 to December 2009, and for my budget sheet, I set the bar even higher - my snowflaking goal is based on getting out of debt by June 2009.  This puts my budget back at a zero-dollar budget (or maybe even more) and puts me back into penny-pinching-counting mode, which is what works best for me.  Because my income is variable we can’t draw up an exactly zero-dollar budget but we can approximate it as closely as possible, and I was erring too much on the side of minimum income vs maximum income.

The second thing I adjusted was how I look at groceries.  I’ve gone back to analyzing my receipts and calculating my spending, and keeping myself to a stricter and accountable budget.  Prices have indeed gone up, which makes things more difficult, but I have tried to be both realistic yet stringent.  My grocery budget is $80 per week for my family of four, and I am sticking to that.  It was $85/week but I reduced it by $5 when I bought a number of protein bars in bulk that will last until about October.    This week, I adjusted my budget up $20 to $100 because we are having visitors all week and I needed to buy some items for their visit we don’t usually have around the house.

Overall, I spent $88.23 this week - $44.17 at Aldi, $18.56 at Walmart and $25.50 at Kroger, which was $11.77 under budget.  I actually spent only $11.64 on items for my visitors, so I spent $76.59 on our normal groceries, which is $3.41 under budget for the week.  I spent $1.79 on impulse items - a bottle of juice, which is 2.3% of my $76.59 grocery spending.  I think knowing I was going to analyze and report helped keep me from putting random items in my cart.  I have been trending towards spending more at Kroger and less at Walmart every week, and this week was no exception.  Every week, it seems less and less things that I shop for and are not at Aldi’s are carried at Walmart, so I have to buy them at Kroger instead.   Walmart is still less expensive at Kroger for non-sale items, but if Walmart doesn’t carry it at all, I have to get it somewhere else.  I have actually been considering getting one of those $330 gift cards at Kroger for $300 since we have been spending more there lately.  I have until July 31st to decide so I’ll be thinking on it some more.

So, July is off to a good start.  Next week, we’ll see.  Hopefully I can keep the trend going by being careful with my purchases and looking for sales every week.

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