Good morning, moneybees!
I received a message from a friend that stated that she loved the blog, but she was having a hard time keeping her grocery expenses low. As I’ve mentioned, the Bee family grocery budget is about $400/month, occasionally over that, and she stated hers was about $600 per month (or $300 every pay period). She asked how we keep our grocery expenses low and if I could share some tips.
I’d love to!
Some of the biggest influences in my success in sticking to a grocery budget:
- Shop weekly and meal plan. I’ve been using Plan to Eat for over a year now, and every Sunday I complete my meal plan and get my grocery list organized at home. We take a walkthrough of the house to see if there’s extra things we need, like toilet paper or paper towels. (We consider toilet paper, paper towels, garbage bags, cleaning supplies, and laundry detergent to be a part of grocery spending. Diapers and wipes are spent from a different category.) I choose Sunday because I know I am off on Sundays and I will be able to do it every week. If I know I have enough things in the home to last us until Sunday, we try to avoid any additional trips to the grocery store throughout the week because the temptation to pick up things outside of the plan is very high and can derail your budget.
- Make recipes that spread the expensive ingredients further. We used to make a lot of meals that served a chicken breast as a serving per person; now we make a lot of things like stir fry that cut the chicken into enough pieces where 2 chicken breasts can be 3 or more servings, especially if you add more vegetables. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but it could turn in to 1 or 2 less packages of chicken you need to buy. Similarly, when we make taco meat with beef or ground turkey, we will often put a can of Ro-Tel tomatoes in it and a can of black beans. It will make one pound of meat enough for very many servings of tacos.
- Make more meatless meals. We have a few go-to meals that we love that are meatless. Some soups, such as this one, are very simple weeknight meals that make a huge pot of soup for around $7. There are other recipes that don’t yield as much but can give you an easy cheap meal if you know you have very little left in your grocery budget for the week.
- Account for leftovers. My first few months of meal planning, I would plan these huge meals for every. single. meal. And Eric was like, “we’re just throwing away leftovers all the time; stop cooking so much,” but I had already bought 8 chicken breasts that week and I was determined to use them. Now, somewhere around Thursday, there’s usually a day for leftovers or foraging in our meal plan. This allows us to eat something that’s already in the house, even if it isn’t leftovers. It helps clean out the pantry and make sure we’re not throwing things away. Saturdays can end up like this a lot too if we make plans to go out but elect to stay in, and that’s okay.
- Plan around your schedule. Every week when I meal plan, I also pull up my schedule for work (it varies week to week) and note if Eric has any duty days where he won’t be home. If I am working until 6, it is unlikely that I will actually make fresh pizza dough when I get home. I will likely order pizza. (Ask me what I did on Friday.) If I am off, I can plan more intensive meals that I love to cook. Crock pot meals work great for days where I have short shifts.
- Plan things you actually like to cook. Not just things you like to eat, but things you like to cook. I know that sounds silly because some people don’t like to cook ever, but I know I have meals I love to cook, and that means I’m more likely to actually make them. If your grocery budget is high, but you’re throwing away food because you didn’t make it, or buying more ingredients to make the beef/chicken/tofu into something different than your first plan, you’re going to have food waste and higher expenses. My go to “fun to make” recipe is Stir Fried Chicken with Chinese Garlic Sauce. It’s simple, I can switch out the vegetables for other ones that I may need to use, and I love a stir fry recipe because it sizzles and pops and it’s a more active cooking, which makes it seem fast and fun. I always joke that if I come home at 6 and don’t want to cook anything, I can still make this. Unfortunately, I made it too many times too often, and Eric is sick of it, but I still try to fit it in every couple weeks.
I could actually go on and on about this, to be honest. I know it sounds exhausting to meal plan all of this, but after the first few weeks of getting recipes into Plan to Eat, I’ve been able to just drag and drop and have my meal plan organized in about 12 minutes. I know there are ways to save a week and re-use it, but because our life changes so frequently, I like to customize it weekly. I still struggle with planning new recipes and not actually making them because I’m exhausted at trying new things, but I am working on it.
As a side note, I think it is worth mentioning as a part of our budget that we don’t eat a lot of processed foods like canned soups and such, I buy cage free eggs and organic milk, and most things I buy are name brand. However, since we make most of our meals from scratch, it’s really usually just a lot of vegetables, meat, and ingredients. As a military family, we do nearly 100% of our grocery shopping at the commissary, and it is so much cheaper than our local stores. Because I shop weekly, I don’t have the patience to get some things at one store and some things at another. I almost never clip coupons, although I will occasionally check the commissary rewards app for deals. I don’t check what is on sale, but I will modify recipes on the fly if I notice that one of the main ingredients is out of season (I’m not paying $4/lb for asparagus ever, so broccoli will have to do).
If you ever have any questions or just want to talk about good recipes, contact me! Since I wrote my weekly meal plan while I wrote this, it’s time for me to head to the commissary. Have a great week!
