To my husband and I, food is extremely important and enjoyable. We love cooking together, exploring new restaurants, reading food magazines, enjoying special wines. We actually were pretty good about saving and financial planning, but I knew we could be doing more. About a year ago, I started trying to cut our grocery budget. At first, I thought enjoying food was incompatible with being frugal. Don’t get me wrong, we love complicated recipes from fancy food magazines that take all day to prepare, but we also love good simple meals like casseroles, sloppy joes, etc. I do enjoy many of the meals I see described on the frugal blogs, but when I tried to stick only to those extreme-frugal recipes I found I truly missed things like fish, specialty ethnic ingredients, choosing an interesting recipe from a food magazine, etc. We also found we had a REALLY hard time sticking to the no dining out rule (we live in a large city FULL of exciting dining options). When we felt deprived, we would often have months where we “slipped”, and ended up going way over budget. We were saving money overall but still feeling really defeated.

Recently, I’m coming to the realization that eating well is something I just don’t wish to give up. But, we need to have balance. 5 years ago, I would decide on a whim to try out a new exotic recipe and would rush out to buy 10 difference specialty ingredients. We thought nothing of stopping by the fancy cheese store to get $30 worth of cheeses and wine for dinner on a regular weeknight. Now, we still do all those things on RARE occasions. We still try new exotic recipes that require specialty ingredients every once in a while, but most of our daily meals are made up of simpler dishes with more frugal ingredients. We try to plan our meals around weekly sales or what is in season (read: cheaper!) at the farmer’s market, and we do a lot of our shopping at ethnic markets which often have cheaper produce or specialty ingredients. We still go out to eat, but we don’t do it as often and we try to order smarter (sharing portions, takeout instead of dine it, visiting on days with special offers, etc.).

We also realized we needed to look at our budget as a whole, not just focus on the food part. If we want to reach certain savings goals and still spend more on food, we need to cut elsewhere. For the most part, we don’t do things like go out to movies, buy lots of clothes, etc. We choose to live more frugally in other areas of our lives because that allows us to enjoy our food as we want. It’s tough to try and remember that frugality isn’t an all or nothing thing, that maybe the lowest possible number doesn’t need to be our goal. Just because I can’t seem to comfortably get our grocery shopping down to $30 a week doesn’t mean cutting it at all wasn’t a huge improvement!

Could we be living more frugally, especially with our grocery budget? Absolutely! I am still working hard to figure out how to organize my shopping, keep track of sales, use coupons effectively, make frugal substitutions in recipes, etc. Admittedly I’m still not very good at those things! (I am always in AWE of all the frugal bloggers and how they make the most of every penny!) It does feel good to know that if one of us lost our job or something, we could certainly cut back on our grocery budget to a survival level. And I expect this all may change soon, as we’re expecting our first child at the end of the year. I have no doubt a baby will drastically change our priorities and shift our budget yet again!

There are still days where I feel like a failure for spending too much, but I still think the frugal thing is worth pursuing if I do it with my own specific family needs in mind.

And thanks for the great question and the wonderful answer!

I have always admired the steadfastness you and your husband have to working together in your frugal lifestyle. My husband and I are lucky to do the same, and I think it makes our marriage even stronger and us closer in the process!

Danelle Ice / Homemaker Barbi

I think that’s awesome of you not to go into school debt. My husband is attending school purely on loans and we are living on everything else, which is tough enough to manage. But, it definitely is daunting to think how high up our necks we are going to be in debt when he graduates. I just want to throw up now, thinking about it.

But, if he wasn’t in school we’d be living off the wages we have for the rest of our lives, and darn Seattle living expenses are so dang high. So, hopefully when he graduates, things will look a little brighter.

Mary in Ohio

I have found that I can purchase fish through our local co op much cheaper. It comes frozen, but usually it is all organic and/or wild. Also ethnic foods, spices and seasonings can be purchased through a co op. Ethnic food stores are also generally much cheaper from what I hear. It just may take some creativity for you to cook the way you enjoy AND stay within budget, but you can do it!

Just a quick question. How do you know how much to save for a house?

OR

Are you going to keep saving until your get to 100% and possibly pay more initially for your home as house prices rise?

What do you think would be better?

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Money Saving Mom here: Unless something drastically changes in the next few months, we’re waiting. The housing market hasn’t hit bottom yet here, so the prices will likely not be rising anytime soon.

But that aside, we really like the freedom of not having to make payments and the self-discipline we’re learning as we wait to save up to pay cash.

Thanks Crystal for another great post!