Brace yourselves.
Are you sitting down?
I met my grocery budget for 2008 with ten dollars leftover. Wahoo!
One of my jobs is to be the chef for our family. Although cooking isn't my favorite thing to do, I've decided to enjoy it, since I'm going to do it anyway. This past year, I really wanted to meet our grocery budget and cook good food. I don't consider it success to meet my budget but have Luke groan when he sees what I made for dinner. (Thankfully, he doesn't do that too often.) I also don't consider it success if I spend the right amount of money, but I dread my time in the kitchen making repetitive meals. Because I like to try new things, and Luke likes good meat, our grocery budget can easily get out of hand.
What helped me succeed this year?
- Planning a menu. Sometimes I do this one week at a time, sometimes two.
- Setting an amount that I could spend at the grocery store each week that left me with a few dollars to spend on the items I inevitably would forget to buy during my major shopping run. Oh, and I had to stick to this amount. If I inadvertently went over, I'd try to correct the next time I went shopping.
- Trying new meals every week, but not multiple times per week. New meals tend to cost more because I buy unique items just for that meal without a plan for how to use the rest of that item.
- Not buying extra food when it was on sale and it would cause me to spend more than my weekly budgeted amount. The exception was when meat would be at the lowest price I could ever find it. Then I'd stock up.
Now that this exciting blog post is over, any ideas on how I should spend my ten dollars?
2 comments:
The first thing that came to mind was buying a really big jar of peanut butter...
Dude, that is a major accomplishment, Deborah! Congratulations! (I totally struggle with staying within our budget all the time with food ;)) Luke has got himself quite a catch! :)
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