This month, we’re buckling down to save more money and put more aside in savings. The goal is for the next few months (into the foreseeable future really) to live off of Dad’s take-home pay as much as possible and bank all of mine. We know that we can’t cover daycare on only one salary, but that’s OK. Our goal is to save as much of mine as possible – which equates to almost 45% of our income.
The first step is reducing our grocery budget. We had a budget of $250 on non-splurge months, and now we’re reducing it to $200 on non-splurge months, and down to $500 from $800 on the splurge months (July is looking to be a splurge month based on what’s left in our freezer). Our grocery budget includes toiletries and paper products as well. To be honest, we only fell within that previous budget 50% of the time – the rest was taken from other budget line items to make up for it.
It’s been one week (two “trips” to the grocery store), and I’ve spent $141. Luckily, we don’t expect to need to buy anything but fresh milk, fruits and veggies for the rest of the month. We needed a few things at Costco (like TP) this past week, so I spent more than planned. But, I really think we can do this – even if it seems almost hopeless already. We’ll just have to do without fresh stuff towards the end of the month. We still have just under $60 left, with three more grocery trips needed – that’s $20/trip. Milk is just over $3/gallon and we buy it weekly, and lettuce for salads is just over $3/week for us. Bananas are pretty cheap, and we have *plenty* of frozen fruit and veggies – we won’t go hungry, but Dad might get bored with what we’re eating.
How do you keep your grocery expenses low?
Grocery’s line item is always a tricky one in our budget. $200 is a fantastic goal — I’m impressed you guys are going for a tough figure like that!
Keep in mind, this month is not one of the months we spend a lot on meat though – July is looking like it will be though (our freezer is looking pretty bare). We have about 3 “splurge” months every year where we buy meat, so the average across all months with our “new” budget will be $275. We also tend to spend $200-$250 on eating out every month – that budget for this month is 0. And the wine budget is reduced to the $40 we send to nakedwines.com every month – instead of the $70 or so we usually spend on wine…
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