Keeping Track of Grocery Spending
Food is always the one place we try to stay on budget but have a tough time staying with. When we weren’t living with my Mom, we spent at least $600, but sometimes as much as $800 I’m sure, a month on food – for a family of four. This included going out to eat and stocking up. We always have a pantry completely full of food.
Mom and I share the food bill. We don’t have a special way of doing this or anything, we just alternate who goes shopping or who grabs whatever we may need at the time. But for January, we decided to keep track of the grocery money. We started using coupons the past month or two and do see the savings, but we are still spending a lot of money on food.
We are going to keep track in a simple way – any food receipts will be kept in an envelope, probably where the mail and coupons are kept. This means every receipt of going out to lunch or grabbing a milk at the store on the way home. It is a little harder for me to do the stocking up thing as Mom doesn’t have the space we had, she does have a pantry but that doesn’t allow for Costco sized shopping.
We are also going to start menu planning, so we can have a better variety of food choices and get out of whatever rut we may be in for dinners. Oh and we did Dream Dinners a couple of times and will go back to doing that probably every other month. We find it to be cost effective, and given how busy we all are it is a good choice for us.