It’s time to take a look at how we did with our grocery budget in July. I’m almost afraid to look! But it’s gotta be done. For the last few months I’ve been cringing towards the end of the month as I see this budget category go up and up…and up. It’s time to start reigning in those numbers and putting that extra money towards our savings and investing goals. Let’s kick off our grocery budget challenge and see how much we can save!
Where We’ve Been
Most of our other budget categories are fairly fixed. Our grocery category has the biggest opportunity for savings. We’ve had a monthly budget for 10 years now so everything is dialed in really well. Food (groceries and restaurants) is one of our biggest monthly expenses and it’s the area where we have the most control.
In those 10 years we’ve gone from expecting our first baby to now having a 6 and a 9 year old. We’ve gone from being a dual income family to cutting our income in half for me to stay home. And now, my husband’s income has surpassed our highest dual income amount. We went from living in a low cost of living area to one of the highest cost of living areas in the U.S. and now we’re in an average COL city. Our dietary preferences have changed a lot too although we’ve usually leaned toward organic and we try to stay away from a lot of processed foods.
The Challenge Goal
I’ve found many mentions in the FIRE community about trying to hit the goal of spending $2 per person per meal on food. Supposedly it’s possible even when sticking with high quality and even organic foods. I’m sure the cost of living area plays a substantial role but since we now live in a pretty average city I thought it would be interesting to see where we stand.
Our grocery expenses have been slowly creeping up in the last 6 months so it’s definitely time to take a closer look at this category. Normally our grocery category includes household items such as paper products (toilet paper, paper towels, napkins, etc) and cat food. We make many of our own cleaners but we do buy a few now and then and those are also included in our grocery costs. For this exercise however, I’m going to calculate the cost of just the food bought at grocery stores but not restaurants. We’re pretty good about staying out of restaurants and it has its own budget category.
Finding the Average
It’s important to do this over about 6 months or so and find the average to get an accurate picture of where we are and our progress over time. We have a stand-alone freezer so we buy in bulk at Costco every 2-3 months and we buy a portion of a cow once or twice a year. I also make several large meals and freeze portions of it to be eaten over the following month or two. Looking at just one month at a time won’t give us an accurate picture but I will update our progress at the end every month. Since there are 6 months left in 2018, it’ll be interesting to see where we stand at the end of the year.
Road Trip! Badlands National Park, South Dakota
July’s Grocery Budget
July was our first month of tracking of this. It wasn’t a normal month for us because we were traveling for the first week. We packed quite a lot of food in a cooler since we were driving. We hoped this would help us avoid a few restaurants and gas station snack stops. Unfortunately, we learned a costly lesson about packing the cooler and we lost about half of the food. Oops!
We met up with my dad for most of the road trip and we went to quite a few restaurants but we did get a few breakfasts included with hotels. That can easily save $50 per breakfast for our family. Our restaurant spending was obviously much higher than it usually is but that money comes out of our vacation sinking fund and doesn’t impact our monthly budget.
I included all grocery store spending for this trip and a gas station trip where we bought prepared sandwiches and salads for a fishing day. These expenses are included in our monthly budget. Our grocery expenses should be a bit lower than normal because a good portion of the food we ate that week was at restaurants and therefor came from our vacation sinking fund. The trip was the very first week of July so the groceries we took with us were purchased in June.
On our trip, grocery store expenses came from monthly grocery budget. Restaurant meals came from our vacation sinking fund.
The Calculation
Time to pull the band-aid off and see how we did! We are a family of four. I’m counting the kids (a 6 and a 9 year old) as a one person each because that will help account for snacks. Every parent knows that snacks are important and the $2 per person per meal goal doesn’t really take that into account. Plus, there are days when my kids will put away more food than us! July has 31 days so our goal was $744. ( $2 x 4 people = $8/meal. 3 meals a day for 31 days equals $744). Let’s see how we did.
Total grocery expenses – $967
Total cost per person per meal – $2.60/person/meal (372 meals in July)
Ouch!
Aside from our road trip, I didn’t try to do anything different for our grocery budget in July. But a week-long road trip does make a difference. I was hoping it would make bigger difference for the better since our restaurant spending was way up. We had a Costco trip at the very end of the month that I included in July’s grocery budget even though we ate very little of that food in July. If I subtract that amount, we end up with $786 which is $2.11/person/meal. That’s not bad! I was hoping to postpone this Costco trip until August but it didn’t work out that way with our schedule. I’ll keep the total in July since that’s when the money was spent. Will that help to bring down August’s numbers? I sure hope so. This is why finding the average over time is important.
Goals for Next Month
- Eat the leftovers We end up tossing a lot of left overs because no one is “in the mood” for them…myself included. It’s hard to reheat left overs for the kids if I don’t even want eat them.
- Fresh Food First My kids love frozen fruit (especially in the summer) but there are times we end up composting fresh fruits and veggies because they want frozen peaches with breakfast instead of bananas. Thankfully, we rarely have to compost garden fresh produce. That would be extremely painful!
- Meal plan around sales I’ve been planning our meals and putting together our grocery list for 5 years using Plan to Eat. It has been such a time and sanity saver. It only takes me about 10 minutes a week to plan out our meals and finalize our complete grocery list using Plan to Eat. I used to plan our meals around the store sales but I got lazy and stopped. I need to take a few minutes each week and check them out.
It’s time to tackle August and bring down those numbers! What are you doing to save money on groceries?
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Very interesting post, I’ve never heard of the $2/person/meal before. Like you said every area is different for living costs, but we (as a family of 4) only spend around $200/month on groceries. We are in Virginia. When i see other people’s numbers it does make me wonder if we eat enough or not ?. Thank you for your post!
Oh my goodness! I would love to only spend $200/mo on groceries! That’s amazing.