Sunday, March 4, 2007

WooooooHoooooooo!

I got on the party train and WOOOOHOOOO!! I got some comments!! I am so thrilled. There really are people out there!!!

I have skipped a couple of days, but with 2 kids and husband and all of that, well, you know.

Here is my latest thing. I was calculating how much we spend on food. It appears that during 2006 we spent about (drumroll, please) 15 THOUSAND DOLLARS!! No, that is not a misprint, FIFTEEN THOUSAND DOLLARS. Now I don't know how much you spend on your food, but that is just ridiculous. (By the way, that includes dining out and groceries and that also includes toiletries, diapers and things like that, so I guess I can't say it is just food. Still y'all, that seems like alot to me.)

If anyone in bloggy land is still there, I want to know how much do you spend on groceries and how do you reduce your spending? So far, we have stopped going out to eat quite so much and we have really gotten serious about clipping coupons. Any favorite web sites or helpful hints on grocery shopping and food bill reduction would be mightily appreciated!!

Anyone still there? Can't wait to hear from you!

6 comments:

nic said...

We spend $5,200 annually on groceries/eating out (including toilet paper and laundry detergent and the like). We budget $100/week and stick to it--it's really as simple as that.

We don't have a ton of food in the fridge at any given point, because the weeks that we do, lots of it goes bad and gets pitched.

We do strictly cereal for breakfast, sandwiches for lunches, and I make dinners from (mostly) scratch, and try to have a hearty soup a couple of nights a week. It is amazing how much cheaper it is to cook for yourself vs. picking something up on the way home. And cooking from scratch is 1/3 of the price of buying ready-made type meals.

We eat our leftovers. I serve the children food in small portions so that little goes to waste. They are free to have as many helpings as they'd like, I just make sure it's a reasonable amount each time to eliminate waste.

We rarely go out to eat. When we do, we save up money from our groceries (i.e 2 weeks of $80 grocery bills means we'd have $40 to go out to eat), but putting it that way makes the single $40 meal seem outrageous, which it is, so we rarely do it.

I don't do coupons much; I do buy things on sale. Occasionally I buy top-of-the-line products, but only when it is a necessary item and the difference in price is well worth it.

We're currently a family of 6, but back when we were just 3, we lived on (no joke) a food budget of $20/week. It certainly wasn't glamorous, but we did it for several years. :)

Good luck!

kardel said...

Nic, I just have to say WOW. My neighbor has always limited their food budget to $100/week, but she adds in additional funds for toiletries and beer and cigarrettes. (Since we don't drink or smoke, we don't have that to worry about, thank goodness.) She said that they ration the paper towels and only use kleenex if they are sick. Her 3 boys are practically grown now and so it's just three of them left at home (and a dog, which we don't have either) and I think she still limits to $100/week.

I guess we'll see if we can do that too. We definitely have to cut back. This week, we spent $88. So we're on the right track. Thanks for the tips.

Aisling said...

At the moment we have our grocery budget right down to absolute minimum. If I make a trip to the freezer store once a month that is usually about £40, then a trip to the meat wholesaler once a month of about £40, then the weekly groceries on top of that come out at about £35 to £45. But that is keeping things very tight with no eating out whatsoever.

Bookmom said...

We normally spend about $60 per week for a family of 5; but once or twice a year we spend about $90 for meat from a farm; we also spend about $60 on milk from a farm per month. Everything is organic and natural.

We do this through buying bulk from organic farmers and at Trader Joe's for what we can't get there. I also use a menu-mailer service (I'm reviewing as many menu mailers as I can find on my blog, womanwithmanyhats.com). With the menu mailer, we don't eat much processed food, but I don't have any planning, and I only shop once a week--no running to the store for forgotten things. And the food would be comparable to eating at somewhere like Applebee's every night.

As for eating out, in the last couple of months barely ever, but normally about once a month at somewhere relatively nice (not fast food) that costs us around $35.

HTH,
Tracey

Katherine@Raising Five said...

Okay, I'll make you feel better. We spend over $250 a week at Walmart and $40 a week at Braums (dairy store - we drink 6 gallons of milk per week). Then there's Sams Club trips for stock items, and an occasional trip to McDonald's or Subway (we have it down to no Happy Meals, drink water and share fries and it still costs $20). We almost never go out to any place like Chili's with all the kids because it costs $50 every time! If I were to add it up (I will when I do our taxes) I'm sure it would be well over your figure.

Life is just expensive. Depressing, isn't it? Think what a nice car (vacation/ second home / etc) we could buy if we just didn't have to EAT?

Living to Love said...

Oh my! I am newly married with no kids and I have that problem too. We do have crammed pack schedule which helps us not to pay close attention to this detail. My husband and I have found the food area to be our biggest financial weakness. We probably spend anywhere from 400.00-700.00 a month on food! (yes for just the two of us) We always try to cut back but can never seem to do as well as we would like! We are going to Disney this next week for vacation. When we get back, we are going to try again. This is the umpteenth time we have tried to revamp our food financyes. Better to keep on than not I guess!