2010 Grocery Project: January

Introduction

We did it! We managed to come under our food budget for the month of January! I won't lie - it was pretty tough. There were moments where I just wanted to succumb to the pressure of stopping by the store to pick up some extra ingredients or snacks, but I knew we could find things to eat or make at home.

Here's the grand total of how much we spent: $145.31
That makes us $4.69 under budget, which will be sent as a donation to the Haitian relief effort.

Lest some of you are thinking that I squeezed in under budget as a result of eating out more often, I can confidently say this is not true. In fact, our restaurant budget actually came in at a few dollars less than what we spent last month.

How did we manage to do it?

I will be honest, I was a little nervous that I was being overly ambitious taking our original $200+ dollar food budget down to $150 for a whole month. But we practiced some simple steps that carried us through until the end of the budget period.

1. I meal-planned. ALOT. It is so much easier to know what ingredients you should buy when you have planned out your meals in advance. This saves you from "shopping off the list" as well.
2. We ate leftovers. When we were tempted to order some fast food, we immediately felt guilty as we looked at our previous meals in the fridge. Yep, no more waste for the Comings household.
3. We made sure we ate soup and sandwiches at least one day a week. Soup is relatively inexpensive and I make my own bread anyway, so this is a pretty frugal meal. (Not to mention one of my favorites!)
4. Whenever we ran out of something, we improvised. When we realized our lemonade mix was used up, we simply added a little bit of lemon juice and sugar to our waters to get that sweet taste. Works, right?
5. We cut coupons and looked for them online! One of my favorite coupon resources is Money Saving Mom. You can get some great prices if you combine coupons with store sales.
   

January's success definitely has me looking foward to shopping for February!