Happy New Year smart spenders! As we ring in 2008, it is time to look at your household budget. Now if that doesn’t sound exciting, you are missing out! This is your opportunity to hit that budget hard, line-by-line and determine if you are on track to pay off debt, save for college expenses and eventually… someday… hopefully….. retire.
If you are not one of those budget driven spenders/savers, you need to be - period, end of story. There is no getting around the need for a realistic budget. This all-knowing tool allows you to have an accurate financial picture and keeps you on track to reaching your short and long-term financial goals. Your budget guides all your spending and saving and should be seen as a friend who has only your best financial interests at heart. If you listen to that friend, you will head towards financial freedom and a debt-free life. If you neglect that friend, you may be doomed to dance with debt forever.
THE RISING COST OF FOOD: In nearly every family budget, groceries are a tremendous expense. I know families who spend $200 per week to feed a family of four or five. That’s $10,400 per year! Gone are the college days of being able to live on ramen noodles and peanut butter for weeks on end. Children require nutrition and variety in their diets and food costs are increasing at an alarming rate. According to a 2007 story from ABC news, food costs are up almost 4% from 2006. The article goes on to say that in California, the price of milk has risen 30%! Here in North Carolina, milk is at $4 per gallon and rising. Clearly, our hard-earned money does not buy as much as it used to at the grocery store. Experts have predicted that prices will continue to climb in 2008 because of the demand for corn and rising energy costs, so be prepared for continued high prices.
What does all this food inflation mean for your grocery budgets? Are you destined to blow the budget before you even see the middle of January? With careful planning and creative shopping, you can conquer those high prices and stay within a reasonable budget.
Each month, for the next year, I will write about a different money saving topic related to grocery shopping. We will be covering couponing, using rebates, understanding retail tactics, meal planning, where to shop and much more. My hope is that by the end of the year, you will have cut your grocery bills significantly while still eating the same variety of healthy, tasty foods you now enjoy. Not only will I address food items, I will also touch on non-food expenses including toothpaste, deodorant, shampoo and paper products.
THE CHALLENGE: For this month, I challenge each of you to take a long critical look at your food budget. How much are you spending per week on: fast-food, take-out, coffee from the pricey specialty shop, lunches at the office cafeteria, school lunches and snacks, convenience store chips, vending machine crackers, drug store sodas, grocery store purchases and all your other food expenses? Tally those numbers for the month and I am betting that most of you will be SHOCKED at how much money you and your family have spent on food each week. Once you have an accurate picture of how much you are honestly spending, look closely at the expenses you can cut back or totally eliminate.
Consider trying a few of these suggestions to help lower your food total:
- Make double batches of freezable meals like lasagna or enchiladas so you always have a meal to throw in the oven for dinner.
- Send leftovers for lunch with the kids and your spouse.
- Put a stop to vending machine and coffee house purchases.
- Buy larger bags of snack foods (ideally when they are on sale and you have a coupon to go with them) and package snack size servings in reusable plastic containers instead of buying from the vending machines or the school cafeteria.
- When you do go out to eat, only drink water. Beverages at restaurants are overpriced and run up a food tab quickly.
- Eat at home - use a meal plan to make dinner stress free.
You will be amazed at how much less money you have spent when you cut out the non-essentials and stay out of the fast-food lane. Even if you only cut back on the extras a couple days a week, you will see a positive difference.
I would love to know how you are doing with your tracking as the month goes on. Please post your results and we can all get a good idea (and lots of empathy I am sure!) about what it costs to feed our families. My monthly grocery budget for our family of 4 (2 adults and 2 elementary age kiddos) has been $50 per week for years, but I am finding that it is challenging to stay in that $50 budget each week as prices keep increasing. I am a long-time couponer and meal planner with a great overstock pantry and an extra chest freezer, so my monthly grocery expenses are usually less than most. I hear from people nearly every day about how hard it is to feed their families on a budget. The techniques I will cover in the next 12 months will give you the tools to cut your grocery bills and hopefully ease some of the pain of those rising grocery costs.
For more information on creating a budget see: http://www.bankrate.com/brm/news/Financial_Literacy/Jan07_budgeting_howto_a1.asp?caret=2a and http://www.betterbudgeting.com/budgetformsfree-basicbudgeting.htm
Now, let’s hear your food budget stories and savings ideas and start slashing those grocery bills! I wish you all a happy, healthy, financially responsible year. Remember, it’s your money – spend it wisely!
By Faye on 01/9/08 in Parents, Featured, Columns, Money, Smart Spending, Main Feature, Editor Picks
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January 12th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
Okay - I’m willing to give it a try. Our current “budget” is @ $100 per week for two adults and a 3yr old. My infant son has a milk-protien allergy, which means he can only drink a specific (expensive) formula so his personal budget is also $100 a week. (Sucks, but a healthy baby is worth it.) I am a meal-planner, die-hard couponer, buy generic more often than not and I shop at the ghetto-grocer (lol). Even so - it seems like we’re still spending more than we can afford. 50 bucks a week is amazing - I hope to get down to @ 75.
January 12th, 2008 at 8:13 pm
How do I make this work for a single mom and one picky eater? I know it sounds like I should spend less, but I don’t. In part, because buying in bulk doesn’t help us. We can’t eat bulk sized items before they go bad. We don’t get a newspaper and I work - so coupons don’t happen a lot. Plus, I need us to both eat more fresh fruits and veggies. So how can I get the cost down without these other options?
January 13th, 2008 at 11:00 pm
Thank you for sharing, Christina!
It sounds like you are doing alot of the right things to keep your grocery budget under control. I am sorry your son has the milk-protein allergy (and that the best forumla for him is soooo expensive!). You have probably already contacted the manufacturer of your son’s formula for coupons, but if not, I highly recommend you give them a call or send them a letter. I have found that many manufacturer’s will send coupons regularly to those who request them, especially when their product is required because of a medical issue.
Do any of the stores in your area double coupons? I have found that for nearly every item we use coupons on, if I wait for a sale at the stores that double coupons (which are the nicer stores in my area including Harris Teeter and Lowe’s Foods), I can buy the name brand products less expensively than the generic at big-box stores including Walmart. I only shop at the big box and warehouse stores a couple times a year now because they are more expensive than the stores that double coupons and offer good sales. If you don’t have any stores in your area that double coupons, then your best bet is to make sure you are coupling sales and coupons and stocking up when the items you use are at their best price.
I also recommend you take advantage of drug store rebates for non-food bath and body products such as toothpaste, shampoo, shaving needs, etc. Thsoe items really eat up a budget but can actually be purchased at almost no cost at many drug stores. With rebates, most of those items end up costing a small fraction of the retail cost. For more information on drug store deals out there, read the article I have published here on CLever Parents titled, “Fabulous Drug Store Deals.”
Thanks again for sharing and keep up the great work!
Faye
Faye Prosser
www.smartspendingresources.com
January 14th, 2008 at 12:17 am
Hi Karen,
I appreciate your willingness to share your situation. I have worked with many single moms who had never seriously considered couponing but knew they wanted to save more money at the grocery store. You will be happy to know that buying large containers of products in bulk (like those found at warehouse clubs) is not always the best money saving technique. I find that smaller containers, that can be openned when needed, are usually less expensive when purchased at grocers who run great sales, take coupons and ideally double those coupons. It is also easier to store smaller containers of non-perishables, canned goods, & paper prodcuts than it is to store the 800 count container of granola bars!
What I have found is that in order to start seeing a real difference in the grocery budget, most people need to employ a number of techniques including couponing, meal planning, some stocking up (but only as much as you can store and use before expiration dates) and flexibility. By flexibility, I mean the willingness to shop at more than one store for your groceries to get the best buys and the willignness to try new brands. You don’t need to shop at every store, but no one store can offer all the nest buys.
Regarding coupons, you don’t have to get the psper yourself to get coupons. Start a coupon trading box at the breakroom at work, ask your friends and neighbors to keep their coupon supplements for you, print coupons from the internet at sites like www.coupons.com and www.smartsource.com. There are even coupons for fruits and veggies including canned and frozen produce.
We eat plenty of fruits and veggies year round on our budget. Many are fresh, some are frozen. Because I pay so little for other items on my grocery list (such as canned goods, pasta, rice, cheese, hummus, bread products, etc), the majority of my food budget tends to be for produce and the little amount of meat we eat. In the summer months we grow a garden providing tomatoes, cukes and more. To supplement, I buy from local produce stands that sell produce much less expensively than the grocery stores (and it tastes so much fresher). I also buy in-season produce as much as possible all year round. In the spring, we eat alot of strawberries and freeze some for future months while they are a fabulous price in the spring. In the fall, we eat more apples and right now we are enjoying citrus fruits. Many stores offer a “ripe” produce section with fruits and veggies that are marked down because they are ready to eat that day or the next. I often buy bananas for 25 cents a pound in the ripe section of my local store and we eat them in smoothies that day and I make banana bread with the rest.
My freezer has many bags of Birds Eye Steamfresh veggies and Green Giant boxed veggies that were at least 80% off using sales and coupons. These are excellent sources of the same nutrients you find in fresh produce, but can be stored long term and often cost a fraction of the price of fresh produce when bought on sale with coupons. Just last week, I purchased Green Giant boxed spinach and boxed sugar snap peas at no cost - FREE. The regular price of the veggies is $1.99. They were on sale BOGO (buy one get one free). I had manufacturer coupons for 50 cents off one box that I found on E-bay. The coupons were doubled to $1 so the product was free. I made some delicious spinach enchiladas this week with one of the boxes and even my 8 year old loved them.
I could go on and on but I need to take the blueberry bread out of the oven - Yum!
I hope this helps!
Faye
January 19th, 2008 at 12:43 am
Hi! I’m so glad I found this blog today. My family is on a pretty strict budget (for about 4 months now) and I’m having the hardest time staying within our grocery budget. I cut coupons, buy in bulk when it’s cheap, etc. but I must be missing something. We are a family of 4 (2 adults and 2 boys (2 & 4)). We are trying to spend $260 a month but easly hit $300 or more!
January 28th, 2008 at 12:01 am
Hi Carrie,
You are definitely off to a great start. There are lots of people who spend MUCH more than $300 per month for a family of 4. Hopefully you will find lots of new tips and techniques in my upcoming monthly articles. If you are not already buying most of your bath and body products (toothpaste, shampoo, razors, depderant…) at drug stores like CVS and Walgreens, I highly recommend you reconsider. By using their rebate programs, we barely pay anything at all for those types of items. Check out www.hotcouponworld.com and read the CVS for beginners thread to learn all you can about CVS’s ECB (Extra Care Bucks) program. Walgreens Easy Saver rebate monthly catalog has fantastic savings each month as well. Thanks for posting and please let me know how it is going each month!
Faye
February 22nd, 2008 at 9:21 pm
Hi I am in Australia and I am a stay at home mum/mom. We are a family of 6. 2A 3boys 6,4,2 and a girl 9 months.
I currently spend up to 650 on food a month. I do have a deep freeze which I utilize but I could do better. My current inspiration is a family of 7 that have reduced their monthly grocery bill down from 1200 to 300!!! aca.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=375095
That’s a massive saving and I have now started the challenge for us. They buy at the farmers markets, 20 kgs of potatoes, carrots, anything that comes in bulk. They leave some fresh for a couple of days and freeze the rest (google how to freeze certain vegetables - sometimes its better to blanche them first) Some people freeze bananas to use later for a cake or bread, The meat we now buy from a bulk butcher and do the portion freeze. Quite often I go to the once a month cooking website for tips on new recipes and if you have the time to make up a couple of dishes to freeze it is so worth it when you can have a night off from cooking and enjoy just reheating! So long as you have a stock of recipe bases like ingredients for sauces, flours, sugars, pastas, and some tinned food and meats.
With food going off I puree them and freeze them, I quite often mix purees in with the mashed potato and others in with gravy’s so the kids still are getting the goodness of vegies - they just don’t know it.I was given the Deceptively Delicious book by Jessica Seinfeld and it is quite handy for the picky eaters to ‘hide vegies’.
School snacks were a big expense for us. I make my own biscuits now, I don’t buy chips at all, they get on average, a piece of fruit if not fresh they get the tinned stuff in portions, a small yogurt, a stick or slice or cheese, crackers with spread, a sandwich, maybe a piece of cake. They are still happy. They still have the dairy, the carbs, the fruit, and whatever else is in there. I have taken it back to basics with the cleaning products, you can make your own for a fraction of the cost and it lasts for AGES! I wrote a list of things I just have to have (milk, formula, nappies/diapers, wipes, basic ingredients) and then I went through again to pick what I can buy in bulk. I found recipes to make my own wipes for baby and even just grubby hands, (paper towels, bath liquid soap, water) recipes for cleaning products, washing powder - it’s amazing. With a little time and effort searching I have no doubt I am on track for 300 per month if I can get back to basics and make my own! I copied the link about the family who is my inspiration but I’m not sure it will work. Sorry if it doesn’t.
Good luck everyone! Dani L
February 25th, 2008 at 12:08 am
Hi Dani,
Thank you for sharing the link to the story about the family of 7 and their new frugal ways. I hope they can continue their frugal shopping and meal planning. I wonder if they will do a follow up story about them in a few months. If you happen to see it, please post the link.
I saw Jessica Seinfeld on a morning show not too long ago and she was wonderful! I love to puree veggies and add them to the kids foods. We also puree alot of fruit for smoothies and they love their “milkshakes” with fruit, yogurt and milk. We used to put pureed fresh spinach in pizza sauce and they didn’t know it was there until they saw me do it once. They liked the taste so much that now I don’t even have to puree it, I just cut it in to small pieces. We also add flax seed to alot of foods and it adds such a nice nutty flavor that they don’t know it’s there.
It sounds like your children have delicious and healthy lunches. Thanks for sharing their typical menu.
Great job on the $300 per month grocery budget. I recently worked with a woman who has been spending $1500 per month on groceries for a family of 6! She was amazed at the savings I had just from buying sale items and using coupons on sale items. I can’t wait to see how much she is able to cut her grocery bill in the coming weeks.
Thanks again for sharing and keep up the great saving!
Faye