I’m currently challenging myself to stick with a $70 grocery budget for our family of five. This includes almost all of our breakfasts, lunches, snacks, and dinners + most household products (toiletries, laundry soap, etc.).
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Thanks for your patience with me as I was mostly offline Friday and Saturday for my sister’s wedding (see a picture from the wedding here). I had planned to get this up on Friday and then was busy with family stuff and wedding stuff and it didn’t happen. And then I was gone from 6:30 a.m. until 10:30 p.m. on the day of the wedding and only cracked my computer open for a few minutes!
But here I am with our grocery update — even if it’s two days late! 🙂
This was another weird grocery week again because we got home from our road trip on Sunday night and then I left on Wednesday for my sister’s wedding in Kansas and then Jesse and the kids flew down late Friday night (after school was out) to meet me in Kansas for the wedding on Saturday.
So once again, I didn’t do much grocery shopping and we mostly ate from the freezer and pantry when we were home. But I did pick up a few markdowns from Kroger.
We’ll be home for the next two weeks, so I’ll likely be doing quite a bit of stocking up while we’re home so that our pantry and freezer is filled back up again now that we’ve sort of eaten it down because of not doing much shopping the past few weeks.
Here’s what I bought:
Kroger Shopping Trip
- Kroger water — $0.89
- Gallon of milk — $2.59
- 6 bottles of Turkey Hill Tea — marked down to $0.39 each
- Yoplait Oui Petites — marked down to $0.99 each
- 1 loaf of bread — marked down to $1.49 each
- 2 bags of potatoes/sweet potatoes — marked down to $0.99 each
- Uncle Ben’s Ready Rice — free with Free Friday coupon
- Bumblebee Tuna — free with Free Friday coupon
- Simple Truth Eggs — priced at just $0.50 per dozen!! (This was only at one Kroger store — they must have been overstocked. I went to another Kroger store and they were $2.79.)
- 3 family-size packages of Oscar Mayer deli meat — marked down to $2.99 each
- Total with tax: $19.37
By the way, yes I’m that woman who brings pretty much most all of my own food when I fly. Not only does it save a lot of money… it also means that I eat healthier!
What I Spent This Week
Total spent: $19.37
Cashback Earned This Week: 75 points from Fetch Rewards for scanning my receipts
Note: When you see the meals below, please remember this: I buy ahead often. Which means that when I find a great deal on something I know we’ll use, I buy as much as I can afford in our budget to have on hand.
This means that you aren’t going to see all of the groceries my shopping trip that I used to make all of the meals we ate. And it also means we didn’t use all of these groceries up this week — because some of them will be saved for later weeks!
Please also remember that I’m putting this out there and it’s not a perfectly balanced menu. This is just really what we ate — and I hope that it encourages you to see the real-ness and lack of perfection here. ?
What We Ate This Week
Breakfasts:
- Cereal, Oatmeal, Scrambled Eggs, free breakfast at the hotel (Everyone is on their own for breakfast!)
Lunches:
- Hard Boiled Eggs, Best Bran Muffins, Avocados, Salad, Grapefruit, Cottage Cheese, Apples, Pumpkin Pancakes, lunch with my family for the wedding (Jesse & Me)
- Turkey Sandwiches, Fruit, Veggies, Yogurt, Cookies, Capri Sun (For the kids — They are in charge of their own lunches.)
Snacks:
- Best Bran Muffins, Yogurt, Cottage Cheese, Fruit/Veggies, Cookies, Hard Boiled Eggs, Turmeric Milk
Dinners:
- Saturday: Dinner Out on our road trip (we used extra grocery money that we hadn’t spent for this)
- Sunday: Leftovers/Fend For Yourself
- Monday: Sausage/Peppers/Onions in the Crockpot, brown rice
- Tuesday: Lasagna Casserole (from the freezer) Salad
- Wednesday: Meatballs from the freezer, mashed potatoes
- Thursday: French toast
- Friday: Dinner Out (Jesse and the kids were flying out to Wichita for my sister’s wedding; I ate dinner with my family at the rehearsal dinner.
I enjoy reading about how others save on their groceries. It is just my husband and I in the home. We had a cow and pig butchered so rarely need to by meat (sometimes I’ll buy chicken) and I try to save with coupons, online savings apps, shopping at Aldi, and definitely shopping the mark-down section. We rarely eat out and pack our lunches each day for work. Just on food I will spend $200-$300 monthly. The months it is higher it’s because I have stocked up on a deal I found. I never really know if that’s a good deal or not. Curious to what others think or if I’m on target like I think I am with being frugal with my food spending. Thanks!
In my area $200-$300 a month worked out for us as a couple sticking to a budget. We did $200 for awhile and gradually moved up to $300. We added a child somewhere in that shift; I’m not sure where. Without experimenting with a beans and rice diet, I’m not sure we could have gotten much lower. The weeks I would try to keep it to $40 or $50, we were not eating much meat or any extras. We could certainly have used more produce. Especially if you’re counting meals out, I think your budget sounds realistic. It’s somewhat more frugal than what the government recommends as a “thrifty” budget for your family size ($323.20).
https://www.cnpp.usda.gov/sites/default/files/CostofFoodSep2018.pdf
I think you’re doing a great job, Jenna! And if it works for you and your budget, then I say go with it!
Your sister’s wedding dress is beautiful! Do you know where she got it? My brother’s fiance is struggling to find a short sleeve dress that is budget-friendly. Since she is currently out of the country she is open to doing something online but it’s just hard to know what sites are safe.
I know she got it online and had it altered quite a bit. But I’m not sure what site she got it from.
In a previous job I often flew to another city for work, sometimes as much as twice a month. At the time, my company did not pay for lunch and was very strict about this. I would pack my lunch- salads for the week in plastic containers. The flight was only an hour, so total the containers were out of the fridge possibly two hours. I had a coworker that bought a bottle of salad dressing that I kept in the fridge at the other location. I saved at least $10 a day doing this. On a budget during the recession, it was a huge help.
I love this! I think that many people don’t realize that you can bring a lot of different kinds of food on planes — and by doing so, you can save a lot of money and eat healthier!
Another thing we often do when traveling is to go to the grocery store and buy food. Again, it’s usually much less than eating out.
Crystal, can you share your sausage, onion & peppers recipe? 🙂
Well, I don’t use a recipe… I just chop up sausage (Kielbasa/rope sausage) into slices and chop up onions and peppers and add some water and possibly some seasonings and then cook in the slow cooker for 3-6 hours.
Thank you 🙂 it sounds super yummy!