I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…

Archive for the ‘groceries’ Category

Last week, a commenter asked what types of things I buy at each of the grocery stores I go to, so as well as an overview of how spending went this week and this month, I’m going to do a quick outline of what types of things I buy where. That might make it clearer as to why I go to so many stores.

First off though - how did this week go? I set a $75 budget per week for the month of January, and so far, I’ve had weeks I was way under, and weeks I was a bit over. This week I came in at just slightly over budget at $75.98. I spent $56.55 at Aldi and $19.43 at Walmart (no good sales at Kroger this week). I did buy two impulse items - garlic bread for $1.20 and salad dressing for $1.89 (I’m sick of the one bottle we have left) for a total of $3.09, or 4% of my spending on impulse items. Things went pretty well this week and overall, I came in just $9 over budget for the entire month of January. That is partly due to stocking up on pork roasts last week when Kroger had the $0.97/lb sale. I think $75/week is a reasonably ambitious target for me to shoot for, so I am going to keep the same budget in February. Maybe by March I’ll feel confident enough in it to try and knock it down to $70/week.

So, why are three different stores part of my grocery shopping routine? First off, I don’t think I’d go to three different places if I didn’t have a fairly efficient route to get to all of them. The majority of my shopping is done at Aldi, which is also the furthest away from me (about 20-25 minutes by car). To get home, I practically drive by Walmart and I do drive right by Kroger. So it only adds a miniscule amount of driving to my trip and only the time it takes to actually go to two additional stores. I go to three different stores because one is generally cheapest but does not have everything I need (Aldi), one is cheapest on the things that the first does not have (Walmart), and the last runs good sales and I get their flyer in the mail every week to check them out (Kroger).

Aldi is a store that carries primarily their own generic brand and little else. They have a limited selection, but what they do have is very inexpensive. I generally purchase the majority of my breads, dairy, canned goods, frozen vegetables, produce, condiments, cereal, dry goods (pasta, beans, rice), paper products (toilet, towels, tissues) and some of my meat there. I also buy a limited number of over-the-counter medicines and toiletries there, but there is a very small selection available.

I then go to Walmart to supplement what I buy at Aldi with either name brand items or items that aren’t sold at Aldi. I generally buy over-the-counter medicines, cleaning supplies, bakery items, organic milk, and personal care items there. Then, some weeks I also go to Kroger if they have something on a big sale, generally pantry items I use on a regular basis or meat items. Kroger is a chain grocery store here, not small and local but not quite national.

So there you have it - where I go and why. I hope it saves me money.

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Just don’t stray from it. The damage is going to be astounding anyway, so just try and minimize it and don’t stray.

My spouse and I jointly make the shopping list every week. Meaning, he makes the list, and then I go through it and add meal-making “staples” to it like meat or any other things I know we are out of. My spouse is the one that keeps track of our everyday items like milk and snacks and salad and fruit and other things like that. I don’t know why it is that way, but it works for us.

So when I got the list from my spouse this week, I audibly gasped. It was about twice as long as a normal week’s list. Add to that the fact that it is my son’s turn to bring snack all next week to school, and that I was getting a pork roast at Kroger on a big sale ($0.97/lb!) to cook up today for the week (in the oven now, yay!) and, well, I was wondering if I’d be under $100, never mind $75. I don’t know how we seemed to run out of everything at once this week but we certainly did. Hopefully that means that next week, the list will be short. Time will tell.

All told, I spent $86.29 this week - $52.51 at Aldi, $23.02 at Walmart, and $10.76 at Kroger. So $11.29 over budget, and I have about $80 left in the grocery budget for the month. If I can stay within budget next week, then things will work out okay. I am thinking that I should be under budget next week, since I seemed to buy almost every thing that ever appears on my list all at once this week, but we’ll see. The good thing, I thought, was that the snacks for school next week ended up being about $10, so without that grocery addition, I’d actually have ended up right at budget.

One thing I am much happier with this year in my budget is that I have separated out “cats” as a separate budget item, and that allows me to buy the huge bags of food once every two months or so instead of a small bag of food almost every week, and that should save us significant money over the course of the year. The small bags of food (4 lbs) are $7, whereas the 20 lb bags are $25. So I save $10 for every 20 lbs of food I buy compared to buying small bags. I did buy cat food this week for the first time this year, but that is not included in the grocery total since it is a separate budget item now.

I’ve never made pork roast before so I hope it isn’t a bust. I found a recipe on the internet for it, and hopefully it comes out yummy and my spouse likes eating leftovers for lunch this week. Off to come up with a creative side dish…

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We include medicine and toiletries (toilet paper, shaving cream, etc etc) in our grocery budget. Sometimes, when we are out of quite a few things at once, that has a negative effect on the weekly spending. My budget per week this month is $75, but since the evil car repair I have been striving to get to about $50 per week. I didn’t do that, but I did get under $75, so that was good. My spouse was out of his daytime and nighttime allergy medications, which threw a little wrench into the weekly spending. At least I won’t have to buy those again for a while.

Also, I used the self-scanner checkout at WalMart because then I can use my own bags (I got reusable grocery bags for Christmas) without arguing with a checkout person, and the daytime allergy meds caused a cashier to come check to make sure I am over 18. He didn’t bother to card me though. Heh.

I spent $54.47 at Aldi and $14.58 at Walmart for a total of $69.05. I again bought another box of Oatmeal Squares for $1.99 (I’ll learn to make them myself soon, promise!) which means about 2.8% of my spending was impulse buys. No, I didn’t get under $50 but I still did well, and I am making much progress.

We are going out to a party (my spouse’s holiday party) tonight without the kids - friends of ours are watching the kids so it is a free evening of fun for us… unless my daughter protests and we have to leave early. Gotta work those free entertainment opportunities the best we can, for no more entertainment for a while yet.

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I talked last week about how I was trying to actually use up “stock” items in my pantry instead of buying them without thinking every week (classic overbuyer am I) and how it really has affected my grocery bill significantly. I averaged around $71 a week last month on groceries, and I thought that I was doing really well with that.

Well, I thought I was being as conservative as I could manage. Turns out, when all of a sudden your financial world turns inside out for a moment, and it is imperative to come up with as much cash as possible right away, I can be even more frugal. At least, this week.

I spent $37.03 at Aldi, $4.21 at Walmart, and $3.76 at Kroger for a total of $45.00 exactly. The total really should be closer to $49, because I completely forgot to buy my son’s organic milk. I’ll have to do that sometime this week. But still, $49 is a lot less than $71 in my world. I hope the trend is repeatable. I still have a lot of stuff in my pantry.

I bought one impulse item, Oatmeal To Go Squares which were at Aldi for $1.99 a box. I love those things. I will eat them in the morning instead of my usual oatmeal so it isn’t completely wasteful but still, oatmeal is cheaper. But these are better. Trust me. Yum. That equaled 4.4% of my grocery spending on impulse items. Not too bad.

I don’t know if this is repeatable every week, but I’ll sure be trying. $100 under budget for the month on groceries would be $100 more of my car repair that will become just a memory.

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Well, we are back! We got back late last night, and it will take me a few days to get back into the swing of things, but the blog will go on. I have lots to share financially from our trip (two words: budget failure) and also just a lot of general financial things that have been floating around in my brain. There will be new posts tomorrow and Tuesday and I plan on the blog being back up to speed and in full force by Wednesday, maybe sooner. We’ll see. Vacations turn my brain to mush.

But something that has to be done, no matter how mushy my brain, is grocery shopping. Even before Mrs. Micah submitted her guest post to me on overbuying and underbuying, I knew I was an overbuyer. I just didn’t know what it was called. And working on controlling that has actually been the key to making my grocery budget work this month. In the past, there were things I bought every week, pantry staples, that I just bought every week without thinking about it. Yes, they were all things we use, and yes, we did use them. But much like bulk buying just because it is a good price without any further thought to need, buying a set list of items every week ‘just because’ can wreak havok with your grocery budget. And, in fact, it did. This month, I vowed to not have ANY standard ’set’ list, and only buy what I was really out of or what was on a significant sale. And instead of hovering around $90/week, I have consistently been hitting the low to mid $70’s.

That’s the good news. The bad news is this makes me realize I need to drop my grocery budget back down to $75 for the new year. No more feeling self-satisfied because I hit way under budget like I did this month. But, that’s okay. It is better to save money and reduce the budget. Especially since the smaller my budget is, the more potentially I have opened up to debt reduction.

This week, I spent $53.45 at Aldi and $16.59 at Walmart for a total of $70.04. I bought two packages of hamburger rolls on special for $0.25 each, so $0.50 total or 0.7% of my total spending for impulse purchases. Part of that is that Christmas provided us with tons of snack foos in our stockings, and part is due to me squelching the overbuying tendencies.

Overall, I am $78 under budget for the month of December in groceries. Which means I spent an average of $70.31 each week for the 4 weeks we were home to shop. I am going to set next month’s budget at $300 or $75/week, because as I actually use up my pantry staples I will have to replace them and spend a little more than I have been. But I think the pantry will carry me through another low-spending month… I really am a serious hoarder.

And the under budgetness in groceries this past month will help counterbalance the fact that I did not factor tolls and food on the road into my Christmas trip budget at all… more on that later. As I said - complete budget failure. Not a spending failure - a budgeting failure. Heh.

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