Our usual monthly grocery budget is $112.50 a week. We challenged ourselves to spend only $50.00 a week for a month. Turns out with how the dates fell it made more sense to do it for five weeks, or just over a month. The slight problem with this was that by including the last few days of February my first week was over $50. Failed straight out the gate? Bummer.... slight change of plan - an average of $50 a week. After all, it's an average of $112.50 a week normally. Challenge saved! But even harder with the rocky start...
The first week was three grocery shops (I like to shop around) which totalled $83.72. Eek!
The second week actually involved five different grocery purchases, but some were really small (thanks to my hubby picking up milk at 7-11 for coffee at work). They only totalled $40.16 so we weren't out of the game yet, we just had to catch up.
Week three was even better. One shop and only $29.26 for the whole week.
Week four held three shops and a total of $27.71.
We are in the final week and have spent $180.85 total so far, leaving us $69.15 for this week. It looks like we might just make it!
I'm excited by this for several reasons. I like meeting my goals. I like having "extra" money. I like clearing out the cupboards for more food. (I'm so glad we don't have as many boxes of rice and almond milk as we did - I'm sick of that stuff!) Win all around. If we do make our goal we'll be able to tuck $312.50 into a savings account for when our income is a little lower than usual. I see this happening in the couple of months, which of course was the reason for the challenge.
I miss my soy milk. That's about it though. What have we been eating? Last night was a yummy cinnamon chicken dish with squash, asparagus and rice. Other meals of late? Veggie burgers with homemade "popcorn fries"; stuffed pasta with sun dried tomatoes; burritos.
We are a bit strange in our collection of nonperishable food that fills the coat closet (at least we don't hide it under our couch anymore), but I'm happy we haven't had to resort to eating all the cans of peaches just for fruit. We've had fresh kiwi fruit, strawberries, bananas and various veggies.
It hasn't been as hard as I thought it would be, but I'll be glad to bump up my grocery purchases a bit next month. We're all out of brown sugar and chocolate chips and that means there are no fresh baked chocolate chip cookies in my immediate future... unless someone wants to bring me some???
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