Master Your Grocery Budget: 3 Strategies to Curb Overspending
The average household should try to spend between $125 and $150 per person per month on groceries. Currently the sum is closer to $300-$400 per person. If there is one area we can all do better, it is our grocery bill! Growing up we always ate at home, if we ate out, it was a birthday or a special occasion. Those days seem long gone in a society that spends more money on food than any previous generation.
Have you ever wanted to save money and be like those super women who coupon and come to the register and owe next to nothing?! Me too! I don’t have the time or the skills these ladies and gents have but I do have a few tricks up my sleeve that help me stay on budget and be as frugal as possible.
Below are a few quick ways that I save when grocery shopping.
Plan Your Meals
- Make a list of all the meals for your week. Include weekends. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner and Snacks.
- Get creative. No one likes the same thing week in and week out. Have meal theme nights! (Soup Night, Pasta Night, Game Day Food, Picnics for weekends) Set up a calendar so everyone knows that tonight is Homemade Pizza Night. Anything to help you eat in and not out!
- Gather meal ideas from family. Let each person pick one meal for the week. Happy Family = Happy Life!
Shop with Purpose
- Make a list of all the meals for your week. Include weekends. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner and Snacks.
- Create a list of the items you need to make each of these meals happen and only purchase those items. Can’t stress this enough, Only purchase what is on your list. Most frugal shoppers only go to the store once a week and are purposeful in their shopping. Do Not go to the store when you are hungry. I can’t tell you the awful decisions I have made about food choices if I am in the grocery store and I am famished!
- Buy Generic. Check out this great article on 22 things you can and should be buying generic.
Meal Prep
- Make enough to have leftovers. I will take the leftovers from dinner for my lunch the next day. Fast food on every corner has made it easier than ever not to eat at home and Americans are taking advantage of that. The average person will spend over $3,000 annually on eating out for lunch. That is enough to take a vacation!
- Make meal prep easy and be strategic with freezing. When you cook a batch of chicken, cook more than enough for recipes later in the week. Fry or grill your beef ahead of time, if it makes sense, or if you need it for a recipe. Make double the amount of soup and freeze it for another meal down the road.
- Have snacks premade in the car for after-school. Kids are usually hungry right after school and a good healthy filling snack can hold them over until dinner. This will keep you from dropping by a fast food place or convenience store and dropping $10-$20 on food you don’t need.
The benefits of meal planning and being purposeful in your shopping will be more than rewarding when you have a little extra cash for something much more fun down the road. I hope that these ideas can help you come up with a game plan and keep you focused on saving money for you and your family.
Hop over to 10 Ways to be More Frugal in 2019 and check out how to make this year your most frugal.
Resources
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