One Snarky Chica with Issues

As someone with my fair share of debt, I have been looking ways to cut some spending. A few months ago I started keeping track of how much money I spent each month and what I spent it on. It did not take too long to see that I was spending way more than I should be on food for two people. How much is too much you ask? A little over $500! Yup, that is a lot and no do not spend all day eating. So, what was the problem?

First off I noticed that as soon as something was used up I put it on the grocery list and replaced it. More often than not I wouldn’t really need it replaced immediately but out of habit I did it anyways.

Second, I noticed that we were buying fresh fruits and vegetables but they were going bad before we got a chance to eat them. That meant money wasted. Then we would repeat the next week.

Third, I was going to the store an average of twice a week! Why? Mostly because we would decide we wanted something for dinner that we did not have all of the ingredients for.

Upon realizing these things I thought I had some pretty good ideas on how to get that grocery bill down.

Our first attempt at lowering the bill was to only go to the grocery store once a week, unless we needed milk. It was hard to do this at first, but soon we were going shopping only on Saturdays.

After we achieved that we realized that we did not need to buy everything on the list when we went to store. We only need to buy what we will eat before the next store trip. The problem though was knowing what we would want to eat. I happened to be reading America’s Cheapest Family at the time and had remembered how they plan menus of what they will eat. So, we decided to try a menu.

Menu making was such a success that we decided we could plan meals for two weeks at a time and thus decrease our grocery store outings to only every two weeks. Except for milk of course.

After a little work we were able to get our grocery outings down to every two weeks. And we were only buying what we needed.

Now we were still having a problem with our produce going bad though. So, we decided that the menu needed to include produce heavy options earlier rather than later. And fruit needed to be eaten in order of which would spoil first. We just started that a couple of weeks ago and it is working perfectly. No lost produce so far!

The key to making it through till your next shopping date while not spending a fortune is making meals that make a lot of leftovers!

We went grocery shopping this past weekend and are going to try to make it three weeks until we go again. Here’s an idea of what we bought and how we’re going to do it:

We bought

• enough veggie burgers for 6 meals (with a coupon)
• diced tomatoes, fresh garlic and pasta for several pots of spaghetti
• a bag of yukon gold potatoes and a bag of red potatoes
• cabbage, zucchini and squash for a chicken broth based soup for 6 meals
• black beans (in a bag not a can!), fresh garlic, and corn for black bean soup (6 meals)
• salad stuff for several meals
• water chestnuts, baby corns and frozen broccoli for several meals over rice
• bacon and other items to go along with food we already have at home

The cost for all of this? Around $120. And you want to know the best part? I think we can actually go for four weeks instead of three!

One of the keys to saving money is to not buy the packaged/processed items. For instance, I got a bag of black beans that I will have to slow cook for $1.29. A can that holds a 1/4 as many beans sells for $1.69.