$200 Grocery Challenge Results

With today being the last day of June, how did we do on our grocery challenge to spend less than $200 this month?  Not so great, but better than most months: $246.61  We had a few things come up that we weren’t expecting, but I think we did well.  We had to buy more scoopable cat litter after our radioactive cat was no longer radioactive and we had to toss out what we had.  Costco also had a sale on rice and flour – both of which we needed, so a bulk purchase was in order.   ~$250 is better than our normal $300-$350 though!  We also fed my mom for a weekend while she was here as well.

On the plus side, we only ate out of the house on our car trips to and from Pittsburgh (reimbursed), and ordered pizza in only twice in the month – bringing our eating out final to $54.34.  *Much* better than our normal $250-$300 of eating out.  We did buy some wine, but it was limited to only drinking on the weekends, and was mostly Aldi’s house brand (at about $32 for the month)

Except for the $2000 plane tickets that I needed to front the money for (and have since been reimbursed), we spent about $2500 less this month than we normally do.  Now, a good bit of “normal” month is/was debt payment, so that’s some of the difference (about $1500 of that), but the rest is us not spending money.  Good practice for the future since I know what our new take-home pay is: about $2000 less per month!

6 thoughts on “$200 Grocery Challenge Results

    1. Mom Post author

      Hopefully we can keep it up! July will be higher, since it’s a stock-up month, but we’re only doing 2-3 weeks at a time until we know what our housing situation will be.

      Reply
  1. FI Pilgrim

    Wow, that is really impressive. If my wife and I can keep our grocery expenses under $450/month we feel like we’re killing it, and that’s only 2 kids! Well done!

    Reply
    1. Mom Post author

      June was a “low” month – July will be a lot more, our freezer is empty! We cook once every 4-6 months and live off freezer meals. For those months we “cook”, our grocery bill tends into the $800-900 range. Since we don’t know if we’ll be staying in our house for another 4-5 months, we’re cutting back and just doing about 2-3 weeks of meals at a time this coming week.

      Reply
      1. plantingourpennies

        How big is your freezer? There is no way our freezer would hold that much food. =)

        We went a bit nuts on groceries last month, so I’m hoping to compensate over the next couple of months to bring it back in line for the year. *fingers crossed*

        Reply

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