Amy over at the Foilhat (which appears to be having some technical difficulties) posted recently about her grocery budget, plan and implementation. I was thrilled because I love to talk about food. So I was all set to sit down to discuss our own take on groceries. Then I sighed and realized that first I had to make a confession.
We’ve been making some small changes to our grocery purchasing as in the “what” but we’ve not tackled the money part of groceries very well. And we’ve been making lots of changes in what ends up on the table most nights. But for all our steps forward when it comes to what we are eating, we’re not managing the budget. And if you were to look at our spending (disregarding what we buy) you would quickly see that it kills all the good things we are doing.
Our worst offense has got to be the frequent “run to the store to get a single item but come out with a dozen we didn’t know we needed” problem.
A quick look at our household will show you 4 Adults, 2 Kids with an occasional Auntie. We split the groceries between Grandparents and Parents though we are not very coordinated in our efforts. Though if we are going to the store and the house is out of bread we’ll get it. Same can be said for the Grandparents too. Our typical list will consist of mostly real foods. I’m the lady in the store buying all those beans, flour and oatmeal. I cook mostly from scratch as we’ve developed many issues with commercially processed foods. As much as I like the ease of popping in a boxed pizza, I’ll suffer for it later with heartburn. So we stay away from packaged things as much as we can. We budget $400 dollars a month for food. We figure conservatively that when you include what the Grandparents spend we are near a $600 grocery budget.
My goal for November is to track all the grocery purchases to get a better idea of the overall family purchasing. I’m also working on finding the right combination of store stops to find the best deals on the things we buy. In this last part of October we’re spending some time with our freezers cataloging how much and what we have.
Did you know we had 4 turkeys in the freezer? Me neither and that is a problem.
Planning the menu is an exercise in torture here. We have so many that won’t eat certain things that it is a headache to try to find meals that every one will actually eat. An unfortunate home truth is that we have TWO meal plans – the grandparents are mostly separate except for the fact that they aren’t. When we do plan for the number who eat to include them they inevitabley do not eat. If we plan a special (read expensive) meal just of us then we will of course have a few more mouths to feed. I don’t think it is on purpose but it is frustrating to try to plan meals when there is that level of chaos in play.
Nonetheless I’m trying to really plan or more precisely I’m trying not to eat out. Our budget is fried this month with vacation so it’s somewhat a necessity that we be home for the next few weeks as much as we can.
So we’ll see how this next month goes. I’m planning on continuing to catalog how things have gone. If for nothing else so I can look back to show my boys how awfully hard I worked to feed them when they were picky and small!
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Four turkeys, huh? I wouldn’t have room for much else, it would be pretty obvious to me! I am planning to go through mine too, so we’ll have a better idea of what we have supplies for. We’ve bought ground meat on sale and did some bulk cooking. It’s so easy to throw together tacos, spaghetti sauce with meat, a casserole, etc when the meat is already cooked. I need to be a bit more organized about it though.