When people find out I feed my family for $250/month, they are shocked! I am constantly asked how I accomplish this.
Let me start by saying since beginning to budget seriously in 2015, our budget is a constant work in progress (as it should be!). Over the past three years, we have had so many changes – moving twice, job changes twice and children joining the picture TWICE! All of these constant changes have led me to be an insane “prepper.” If there was a degree in planning and preparation, I would have a PhD….like 5 times over.
Over time, I have learned there is no quick fix to your grocery budget where overnight you will be able to cut it in half (at least I haven’t found one). If you want to stop spending more than you have budgeted, you have to plan appropriately. Without planning, you will sabotage yourself because LIFE WILL HAPPEN!
If planning ahead isn’t your strong suit, don’t worry! I have 4 simple tips for planning that you can begin to implement slowly. If you make these changes, I can guarantee you will start to see improvement in staying on budget.
(Hint: In order to implement some of these tips, you are going to need some kind of deep freezer. If you do not have an extra freezer, you can still do these things, just on a much smaller scale).
Tip #1 Change your Christmas/Birthday list from material gifts to MEAT.
Ok. I know this very likely seems crazy to you, but this is probably my favorite way that we are able to save money on groceries and have our budget stretched to put more toward debt.
Every year relatives ask us what we want for Christmas, and we can’t think of anything that we really want that we wouldn’t just get for ourselves. This leaves us looking at what we really NEED instead of want (this is ultimate “adulting”). After agreeing on what would actually be helpful to our life, we have started asking for money or gift certificates to our local fresh meat market.
This has been amazing for us! We end up purchasing enough meat for pretty much the whole year, and we buy good meat cuts that definitely wouldn’t fit into our monthly food budget. The only meat I occasionally purchase the rest of the year are some frozen chicken breasts or ground turkey from Aldi.
I know this seems like a bizarre thing to ask for, but I have found it makes my relatives feel so good to give us something that we really NEED and appreciate. They are giving us a gift that won’t get taken to Goodwill in a year or end up in a closet unused. Just make sure you clear this with your spouse before you tell everyone to get him meat for Christmas….that could make for a pretty hilarious surprise.
Tip #2 Buy 1-2 additional staple items per month to build a grocery “buffer.”
Every month I will buy 1-2 “extra” of certain food items to build up a bit of a stockpile at home. This includes cheeses, deli meats, frozen veggies, bread, rice, pasta, etc. These are the most commonly used ingredients in our home.
I am really not big into couponing, but if you are and you find a sweet deal on some of your staple items, I would stock up on those right then (as long as you can afford it!). If you are like me and don’t coupon, another option is the iBotta app. This will save you a few bucks on your shopping trip with next to no effort.
After doing this for 6 months or so, I found this slowly built up our freezer so we would have some staples to tide us over if grocery shopping couldn’t happen right at the beginning of the month. The other bonus to this is if you are ever trying to do a “no spend” month, you will already be stocked up on most of what you would need for that month.
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Tip #3 Prepare freezer meals and/or make double portions and freeze half.
If you are new to the concept of making freezer meals, this may very well change your life. I spent a year trying to pare down our grocery budget purely by having us decrease what we were eating. I went so far as to cut out things like cheese, potato chips, fruits, and yogurt. This was so painful and honestly led to going over budget more often when we were desperate for food.
Freezer meals allow for a fallback when you run out of food or time to make meals. My first experience with freezer meals was when I was expecting my first child. Since then, I haven’t looked back. Freezer meals are a total game changer. There are so many cookbooks and plans out there to help you with this if you have no idea what I am talking about. My favorite cookbook is this one. If you want someone to do the bulk of the work for you, an awesome online service called FreezEasy offers recipes, shopping lists and 10 meals prepped in an hour. I haven’t tried them yet because I am finding I still have time to do the prepping myself.
The other thing I have started doing with minimal extra effort is making larger portions and freezing half. I do this with anything I make in a Crock-Pot, soups, chili – easy things. This will stretch the meals into the next month if needed.
Tip #4 Meal plan with recipes that use the same ingredients on sequential days to prevent waste.
If you are trying to stick to a budget, you need to have a plan. In the beginning, I used to buy all my fresh produce and dairy products for the entire month at one time. Inevitably, I wouldn’t use them in time and they would end up in the trash. What a waste!
What I do now is plan all my meals to ensure I don’t waste any ingredients I have spent money on. This has been a total game changer!
Here is an example week:
Monday: Tacos (we need tomatoes, lettuce, sour cream, cheese)
Tuesday: Southwest chili (finish up tomatoes, sour cream, cheese)
Wednesday: BLTs (finish up lettuce and tomatoes further)
Thursday: Crock-Pot “crack chicken” with bacon (finish up the bacon from BLTs)
Friday: Quick calzones (using ground turkey, spaghetti sauce, mozzarella cheese)
Saturday: Spaghetti (finish up ground turkey, spaghetti sauce, mozzarella cheese)
You must meal plan your weeks with intention. If you don’t pay attention to the ingredients you are using that can spoil, you will end up wasting food and money. Start slowly using very simple meals. Don’t try to do anything fancy when you are just starting out. As you can see in my examples, simple is my friend.
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All of these simple tips can be implemented slowly in your life to help you stay on track with your grocery budget. If you have a freezer full of meat, extra staple items, freezer meals and you are using every ingredient you buy with no wast, you WILL see improvement! These are the things I have adopted into our everyday lifestyle that has allowed me to stay on budget. If I can do it, so can you!
Do you have any “plan ahead” tips that help you stay within budget on groceries?
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