I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…

Archive for the ‘groceries’ Category

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.

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.

There are dancing queens and then there are shopping queens. Today, I am a shopping queen. All told, I spent $223.73 today. Thankfully, not even half of that was on groceries. I had Christmas shopping to finish, boots to buy for my son, a case of diapers for each kid (hopefully the last I ever have to buy for my son), and a trip to JC Penney to use a coupon. More on all that later.

I spent $48.22 at Aldi, $13.77 at Walmart, and $5.60 at Kroger for a total of $67.59, well under the $90 budget. I bought one impulse item, some bakery reduced price onion bread for $1.67, so I spent 2.5% of my total spending on impulse items. I basically followed the “stick to your list and don’t look around” philosophy, and my list was pretty bare bones and no frills. I am still working my way through all my pantry items and trying to only buy perishables each shopping trip. I went to Kroger to buy a turkey breast on sale for $1.19/lb. I am going to make more turkey stock! And hopefully incorporate the meat into 3-4 meals as well.

I had a $10 off any purchase of $10 or more coupon for JC Penney so I went there today with a list in mind. My son needs a sweater, a pair of khaki pants or jeans, and socks. So I looked through the boys department and I found a sweater that was originally $26.99 but with the sale they were having today I thought would be about $10.50. But when it was rung up, it was only $9.17. So I looked around some more and decided to put that back and buy two packages of socks (3 pairs each), originally $7.99 each that were buy one package get one 50% off. With my coupon I ended up paying $2.10 (tax included) for 6 pairs of socks. Yay! I usually never end up using those random coupons that come in the mail or I buy something totally unnecessary.

I did a lot of other shopping but nothing really of note. I am up to $263.15 spent on Christmas gifts, well under the $400 budget, but now my spouse is making noises about wanting to get me a gift. So, we’ll see. I may make a small deposit to his PS3 account as a gift to him then too. Other than if my spouse and I decide to exchange gifts, I am done shopping, everyone else is done. Christmas under budget!

There will be no grocery shopping next week because we’ll be visiting relatives, so only 1 more shopping Saturday in December and $148.77 left in the budget. I think I’ll be under budget in December! Hurrah!

I’ve been out and about today, grocery shopping, christmas shopping, trying to shop for snowboots for my son and failing shopping… fun times. Actually, it was fun. Except for the boots. But I digress.

I decided this week to buy only exactly what perishable items we needed (dairy, fruits, and veggies mostly) and buy nothing else that actually contributed to meals and see how we do. We’ve got a lot of random food in our cupboards and pantry and I want to try and actually use stuff up instead of buying more stuff. Our meals might be rather creative this week, since I didn’t really take inventory before I decided to do this. I did buy meat this week, because there was a big sale at Kroger, but no starches or sides or any frozen vegetables. I really want to try and reduce or spending as much as possible right now while I am between contracting positions, and that’s what food in the pantry is for – to eat. I tend to be a hoarder.

I went to three places instead of two (to get meat at Kroger) and my experiment was a huge success. I spent $27.65 at Aldi, $12.83 at Walmart, and $6.41 at Kroger for a total of $46.89, well under my $90/week budget. I didn’t buy any impulse items, and I think I should go to Kroger on Saturdays more often. They had such yummy free samples! I had salad with raspberry dressing, feta cheese, and craisins (yum yum) and later some hot chocolate and christmas cookies. Way better than the typical Walmart samples. Yum.

I also went christmas shopping today, and in total I have spent about $175 of our $500 budget. And, I only have 5 more gifts left to buy! One of those gifts is a $25 gift card, and then the other 4 I am hoping to keep under $50 total to bring us to $250 spent of our $500 budget. I have been really good about looking for bargains and things people wouldn’t expect to get but I think they will really like. Yay! $250 is more than enough to cover gasoline for our trip to visit our relatives so we may have a few snowflakes left in January if everything goes according to plan. Yay!

My son has huge extra wide feet and the specialty store we have to buy all his shoes at was completely out of his size in boots. Still pondering what to do about that. Must think more about that tomorrow… he needs boots. We have mucho snow!

No, I didn’t go over budget. And I didn’t spend a single penny on impulse items at the grocery store today. But yet I spent more than I thought I would, simply because there were some very odd bulk buys going on.

First, when I went to buy ground beef, there were only family packs left. Just family packs. So I had to buy 5 lbs at once. Which is not a big deal, because we will use it eventually, and I generally freeze ground beef before using it anyway. But it was just odd. I didn’t know holiday shortages extended to ground beef, but, whatever. Then when I got to the dairy case, I found that Walmart has started stocking gallons of organic milk, which are 50 cents cheaper than buying two half gallons. My son generally only drinks a half gallon of milk a week but the milk will be good for two weeks so I got the gallon. Ouch. That stuff is expensive.

But, all in all, I spent $22.35 at Walmart and $64.49 at Aldi for a total of $86.84, which was a wee bit under my $90/week budget for December. And, I won’t have to buy milk next week or beef for a while so the bill should be even less next week. Maybe. We’ll see.

Tomorrow I’ll have to relate my adventures at the scrapbook store today using my gift certificate I got for my birthday a while back. Oh, how I love scrapbooks stores. More than Target even.