How to keep your Grocery Budget Low
Grocery budgeting is one of the hardest budget categories to maintain and it’s one of the easiest categories to overspend on – without even realizing you’re doing it. You go to the store, throw things in the cart, and before you know it, the total is over 3 digits. The cost of food inflation and living in a high cost of living state doesn’t help either. So how do I maintain my grocery budget? I have a couple tricks I’ve learned these past couple of months that I would love to share with you.
I come from a lower cost of living state and moved up to one of the highest in the past year. Food cost was an absolute shock. We spend more running to McDonalds than we would at a sit down meal at Red Robin. Spending a couple bucks on a late night Taco Bell craving? Forget it. And we can absolutely forget about Doordashing anything. The fees alone are enough to make us get in the car to go pick it up. While this cost on convenience hasn’t necessarily been a bad thing – we’ve cut down on fast food and now really weigh the options of eating at home vs. eating out – I still refuse to spend an insane amount at the grocery store. I have to feed my family, which consists of me, my husband, and our puppy dog. But I am not about to spend $800 a month doing so.
It took a lot of trial and error to get our grocery budget where it is. I honestly don’t have a set amount that we spend on groceries every month, what I do instead is budget by paycheck. I also don’t shop for the entire month all at once. That gets very overwhelming very quickly and I can’t keep up with that. It does take me longer to do the grocery list and budget, but this way we are in and out of the store in twenty minutes and don’t spend more than what I plan for.
As a side note, when I say “we” I mean my husband and I. I hate going to the grocery store so he always accompanies me. He is also very involved in our grocery shopping and does most of the cooking.
Before I get into the details of my grocery budget spending I want to make a quick note on my personal numbers. These numbers work for my household. I live in a high cost of living state. I feed two people and a puppy dog. We eat a lot of meat and potatoes. I bring lunch every day to work, my husband has a work lunch program that we choose to purchase. I shop at Safeway (which in other areas is Albertson’s or Haggen’s) and I know that is a slightly more expensive store. Our nearest Kroger is a Fred Meyer’s and honestly that store is too big and stresses me out. I shop at Safeway for the convenience of a regular grocery store – not to mention it is close to my house and has a gas station. Your situation can look a lot different – and probably is.
A great read on financing and budgeting which goes into details about embracing your own numbers and lifestyle for a budget that suits you and your family is My Money, My Way by Kumiko Love – founder of TheBudgetMom.com. You can find her book here.
Alright – back to my personal numbers. My average per month on groceries is about $500. But that is not $250 every 2 weeks. I break it down differently. My husband and I get paid twice a month. One paycheck we have a lot of smaller bills to pay and the other paycheck we have rent. While we have a lower rent for the area it still wipes out 3/4 of our paycheck and I still have to feed my family. My main goal when I started this was to not have to dip into our savings for that paycheck cycle. The way I break our grocery bill up is when we have the paycheck with smaller bills, I budget about $400 for groceries. And on the rent paycheck, I budget $100. So how do I manage all that?
Stockpiling
The answer to that is stockpiling. No, not for the end of the world. But we shop our pantry on the rent paychecks. I buy more bulk and freeze a lot more during our larger grocery bill cycle. Instead of buying one jar of sauce, I buy two. I double our meat purchases. It hurts a bit to spend $30 on ground beef but I’m at least getting 12 pounds. We just freeze the extras.
Now, the cost of food is pretty high here so walking out with $400 worth of groceries is not always a lot of food. So this is where I utilize my other methods – couponing and budgeting separately for larger budget breakers. I’ll go through couponing in a minute but what I mean about budgeting separately for other items is I have budget line items for coffee, energy drinks, and wine. And I don’t have them on every paycheck.
Budgeting Separately for Larger Budget Breakers
Coffee
My husband works at a place that sells coffee with his employee discount so we average about $50 for 90 K-cups. Do I know that it would be cheaper to switch to ground and make pots instead of cups? Yes. However, I use K-cups because it makes me feel like I’m drinking less coffee and the good Lord knows I need to cut down. Am I? Probably not but I will keep lying to myself about my coffee intake. Since I’m the only coffee drinker in the house, 90 pods roughly lasts a month. So that’s $50 every month for my coffee.
Energy Drinks
Energy drinks we have for my husband. I have tried very hard to get him to quit those but honestly, I gave up so now I just budget for them. We just spend about $100 on about 48 energy drinks. We found them cheapest on Amazon. Does that hurt me in my soul to spend that much? Yes. But budgeting is all about your real life – not what you think you should be doing. We just started this and my estimates are that it should roughly last him 3/4 of the month. He drinks about two a day. I also told him that there was no way on God’s great green Earth that I would spend $400 a month on energy drinks so he had better figure that one out. He’s been pretty good so far. These Rockstars are what we ended up getting on Amazon.
Wine
I am a wine drinker. My husband doesn’t drink so that is all me. I budget $50 per paycheck. Safeway does a deal where if you buy 6 bottles of wine you get a discount on all of them. I usually buy $8-$10 bottles of wine. I just add up how much the bottles are at the discount price since it tells me right on the tag and make sure it’s under $50. I also check wine out separately from my groceries. This helps me with my budget categories so I don’t have to add separately. I haven’t found a cashier yet who didn’t mind doing it. I continue to buy wine every paycheck but I have found the more bottles I have in my stockpile the less I drink them. I have my one glass, maybe 2 per night and that’s always good for me. At some point when I have enough in my stockpile I will probably go down to every other paycheck purchasing wine.
Couponing
My last bit of advice is to coupon. I basically watched a couple episodes of Extreme Couponing on TLC, told myself “I could probably do that” and did. At first, it was completely overwhelming, I cried a couple times, and my husband was very skeptical. It took me about a week of working on the grocery list and I was so nervous when we went to the store. However, I was able to save $78 during that trip. We walked out at $152 with $231 worth of groceries. At that checkout – I was hooked. And my husband was a true believer. Now I average about 45%-50% savings on all my grocery trips. It takes me about 4 hours to do the grocery list (I break this up by working on it a little each day) but then I am in and out of the store in 20 minutes.
I will go over in detail how I coupon in a different post but I basically plan out our meals for the week. We’ve never been good about sticking to a certain meal for a certain day of the week so I just plan maybe five or so meals. We always eat out on weekends so I don’t count those. Then I break up the meal plan into ingredients. I see what I have in the house and then I delve into the grocery list. By referencing weekly ads to see what is on sale, I start there and swap the ingredients by that. Say that we were going to do hamburgers one night but hot dogs were on sale. I would swap that out and we would have hot dogs. We do it a lot with beef and chicken depending on the meat sale. Kielbasa is almost always on sale and a staple in our household. Next, I go through the digital coupons on the Safeway website and load what I need on my card. By combining sale items and digital coupons, I am able to bring the price of items down lower. Lastly, I see what paper coupons I have. Whether that is from printable manufacturer coupons or newspaper coupons. However, I don’t see a lot of those for food items.
Meal plan -> Ingredient list -> Shop your pantry -> Shop Weekly Ad Sales -> Coupons
Once I have all of my grocery items with their sale price, I add everything up and account for tax. I don’t usually add tax in my math but I just assume it’s going to be $30 or so higher than my total. If I am okay with what we are spending and it fits in my budget for that week, we go and purchase. If it’s too much, I reevaluate the list and take things off that I didn’t absolutely have to have that week. That could be soda or sports drinks. Maybe I was going to buy some extra packages of noodles for the stockpile that trip.
As long as you are going in with a plan to the store and know how much you are spending before hand – it really keeps your budget down.
My advice if you still have a hard time sticking to your list at the store – Instacart. Or grocery pickup. Order everything before you go and then you don’t even enter the store. And you know exactly how much you are spending and can adjust as necessary. I know Instacart can come with fees for delivery so make sure you account for that.
I hope this helped give you some ideas to cut your grocery budget! Always shop your pantry first and plan out your trips to the store. The grocery store websites have all of their items priced out so you can do your entire list on the computer before you go. It’s not a quick process, but it sure is worth it!
