A lot of the blogs I follow have been talking about meal planning lately and it got me thinking about it. I've done a weekly meal plan since Greg and I got married. I don't care much for frequent grocery trips and I love my lists, so it's always been a given for me. One thing I've never done is budget our food spending.
Today I looked pretty hard at our grocery bills. It was kind of painful. Menu planning is a great first step, but we're making some big mistakes with the way we shop.
So here are some of my ideas to reduce our grocery spending:
1. Stop shopping at Walmart. Since we moved here we've been grocery shopping pretty exclusively at Walmart because we really don't have a good grocery store here. And sure, they actually do have the lowest prices on a lot of things. Our problem is that it's so easy to head over to the non-grocery part of the store and just grab a few extras. Like movies (one of my biggest problems). So maybe we won't stop shopping at Walmart altogether, but we definitely need to be more careful about what we buy while we're there.
2. Plan lunches. My weekly meal plan has always been for dinners only. We just grab a few staple items, like tortillas, bread, deli meat, etc., for lunches. I'm thinking if I take a more active approach to lunch that we'll not only enjoy the food more, but we'll save money in the process.
3. Eat more simple food. I always cook from a recipe. Always. Right now I can think of one meal that we have regularly that I don't use a recipe for (salmon & couscous). What's wrong with a simple pork chop or chicken breast? Why do I always have to dress it up? (Because it tastes better. But I'll try to adapt.)
4. Plan based on ads. I'm not a coupon clipper. I don't think I ever will be. I know so many people who get amazing deals because they clip coupons. I just don't have the patience. But on this awesome website I found there were several suggestions for saving money even without coupons, including planning your menu based on what's on sale. I think this will actually make it even easier to plan—it won't be so hard to come up with ideas.
5. Buy a few extras. We have almost no food storage and this fact has been bothering me for a while now. I'm going to start buying a few extra of whatever is on sale if it's something I'm already buying. That way it will definitely be something I'll use (we pretty much rotate between the same meals every few weeks) and we'll have a supply in case something comes up.
6. Avoid impulse buys. I think part of it might be the pregnancy, but I've been bad about visiting the Walmart bakery lately. Those cakes and cookies are awfully hard for me to resist right now. That great website I mentioned offers some free menu planning worksheets and they include a space for snacks. Weird. Just like I never planned lunch, I never thought to plan on buying snack food, but I think knowing ahead of time what we'll buy will cut down on extras.
Anyway, I'll let you know how it goes. What are some of the things you do to keep your food budget down? Any suggestions?
1 comment:
Walmart had to pull their Grocery section out of Germany because they could not come close to Aldi's low prices! Our family shops at Aldi whenever we are going near one of their stores. Quality is great. Double money back guarantee.It's worth going out of your way once a month to save this much. April & I have really been geting into couponing. It feels like you're getting paid for clipping when you can save fully 50% of your grocery bill! In a recent RS class, a sister who just starting clipping coupons last Fall now has a 2 year's supply of food!
Re meal planning. I always go to the store with a basic meal plan but it is subject to change depending on what I find on sale/Manager's specials.
Do you have a Bishop's Storehouse near you? You can start with simple staples like rice, sugar,flour etc and later expand to dried beans, wheat etc. if you will use them. Usually a big money saver on the basic things they carry.
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