A great tip is to ONLY allow yourself to shop once a week. This forces you to plan, forces you to make and eat what you planned, and plus if you run out well… just make something out of what you’ve got. There is always something there. Finally… we stopped drinking. That helps a LOT. 2 adults, 1 kid, $600/mo average, HCOL area.
Personal finance expert Orford opened up to Bored Panda that saving money at the grocery store is as important to him today as ever.
“To maximize savings, I find it’s always best to start with a weekly meal plan. Planning for breakfasts, lunches, and dinners—and then reconciling that with my budget sets the foundation for good planning,” he explained to us in an email.
“I like to watch what’s on sale this week and plan meals around that. Doing so allows me to have a variety of meals while saving money,” Orford said.
“For example, this week, whole chickens are on sale, so I’ll buy 2 or 3 and make different meals with them to eat in the next few days or freeze them for another time.”
One slightly counterintuitive-sounding tactic that Orford uses is shopping at not more than 2 or 3 grocery stores.
“Doing so allows me to leverage the grocery store loyalty programs while watching for pricing. One store might be great for bulk meats, while another may have a better loyalty program. Others might be better for ‘store brands,'” he explained his reasoning to Bored Panda.
According_Gazelle472:
I do this every week .I take the envelope and only use what is in there .Each envelope has 50 dollars in it this month and that is it.
“For example, no-name brands are often (not always) just as good as the big labels—yet cost significantly less. Trust me, no-name rice and beans will taste the same as something with a fancy name and box,” Orford pointed out.
“And lastly, if there’s a particularly good sale on nonperishables or supplies (think toiletries, cleaning supplies, etc.), don’t hesitate to buy 6 months or 1 year’s worth! If my usual bath soap costs $3.99 and it’s on sale for $1.99, why not buy 12?” the personal finance expert urged customers to consider buying discounted goods in bulk.
Use your freezer. One or two portions left of that dinner from 2 nights ago? Freeze it. Easy, free dinner when you don’t feel like cooking. Look up how to make things stay fresh. Herbs and vegetables are things you should never throw out! Celery and carrots for example, I almost never use up the 1lb bags they come in. Properly washing, trimming, and storing in water that you change out every so often will keep them fresh for weeks. Average household food waste is crazy high. Most households can save 20% just from that.
USA Today reports that the average American household spends over $1,000 per month on groceries. Inflation, supply-chain issues, and increased demand are to blame. However, food costs also depend quite a bit on the size of the household, as well as what part of the US someone lives in.
For example, the average American family spends $270 per week (around $1,080 per month) on groceries. Meanwhile, families with kids spend around $331 per week (more than $1,324 per month) at the grocery store.
Start with eliminating any beverages. Water is enough. Buy no frills store brands. Don’t buy precut fruit. Cut it yourself. Don’t buy premade meals. Use the store app and upload coupons beforehand. Each week shop the sales and stock up on items that way.
I also make a lot of stuff from scratch like breads and pizza and cookies, which saves a ton of money.
Meanwhile, if you live in pricier states, your grocery bill is also going to look bigger. For instance, the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey for October 18-30, 2023, showed that the average California household buys groceries for around $297 every week (roughly $1,188 per month). Americans living in Nevada aren’t far behind: they spend $294 per week ($1,176+ per month).
However, if you live in Iowa, Nebraska, Michigan, or Indiana, you’re probably spending less than $240 per week (around $960 per month) at your local grocery store.
It does help that when school is in session, my kids’ schools provide lunches on school days. Occasionally my kids pack their lunches.
Generally, I do the following:
I meal plan every week. I cook from scratch almost every night. I online shop at Walmart to save time. I do not buy premade anything. Vegetables and fruits are fresh or frozen. No desserts premade. No smoothie mixes, no chips, no sodas, no prepackaged snack foods. Very rarely do I buy sandwich meat.
I refuse to buy name brand. I compare price per ounce on everything (easy to do on Walmart’s website). I don’t buy the expensive cuts of meat. We eat a lot of meatless dishes. We eat leftovers. We eat breakfast for supper.
From time to time when I’m motivated, I meal prep a couple meals over the weekend to save time. Sometimes I make a double batch and freeze half (tonight we’re having lentil chili from the freezer that I made three weeks ago).
Once the week’s money is spent, it’s spent, and we make do with what we have.
Naturally, everyone wants to put food on the table for their family. Ideally, that food is going to be fresh, nutritious, healthy, and cheap. However, high-quality ingredients can be quite expensive. So, you need to hunt for in-season groceries to keep the costs down. Buying food in bulk and then freezing it can also help keep your wallet happier.
If you find yourself really hard-pressed budget-wise, you need to take a detailed look at your expenses. Analyze what types of food items you’re spending the most money on. For example, you might find that you’re a huge meat-eater. However, quality red meat can be pricey. So going meatless even for one additional day every week can make your grocery budget go further.
Similarly, you might realize that you’re spending large chunks of your hard-earned cash on snacks, sodas, and processed food. Everyone needs a tasty little treat to reward themselves every now and then. But if you’re rewarding yourself all the time, it might mean that you’re stretching your budget to its limit. Not to mention that overindulging in junk food is going to wreck your health.
They not only provide food but they have diapers and pull ups for my kids as well as free menstrual products and a large selection of books for both kids and adults.
At our food bank we are provided with a cart and allowed to go “shopping”; fresh fruits and vegetables are always available as are eggs, breads, rolls, biscuits, milk, some type of meat (ground beef, chicken, etc), frozen foods (usually frozen pizzas or different types of fish) and then random stuff in a cooler that you can pick items out of, as well as baked goods (pies, donuts, cookies, cakes, etc).
This week, they had bouquets of flowers they were giving out to each family; it may sound silly, but being able to brighten my kitchen up with flowers that I normally wouldn’t have been able to purchase has been very mood boosting.
Edit: I live in a HCOL city (Vancouver, BC) and my husband and I spend about $800 a month on groceries (excluding personal care items). We eat meat and dairy, although we eat a lot of vegetarian/vegan meals due to rising cost of animal products.
Look for staples in cheaper places, for instance buy rice in 25kg bags at an asian market way cheaper than the grocery stores. The key to saving in the modern capitalistic market is to have the willingness to walk away, and to do that you need to be flexible. If you just have to have a specific item a specific way on a specific day you will pay dearly for it.
Going for a cheeky fast food meal is getting more expensive, too. CNN Business’ Allison Morrow reports that many Americans are disappointed by the constantly rising prices at McDonald’s. Grocery prices rose 1.3% in 2023. However, they were dwarfed by the rising costs of dining out, which rose 5.2% that same year.
The CEO of McDonald’s, Chris Kempczinski, recently pointed out that “eating at home has become more affordable.” Things have gotten so bad that customers have taken to social media and TikTok to voice their concerns. Some people have gone viral for calling out McDonald’s for serving $3 hash browns in some of its locations. Food prices vary a lot depending on what restaurant you visit.
In this context, cooking at home using cheaper ingredients that are in season sounds like a far better alternative than relying on fast food.
Then there are things of habit – using a hand towel instead of paper towel for drying off clean things can cut your usage to a fraction. Say, $5/mo. Same with ziplocks – the volume of these I use for dry goods like open bags of chips, bread, etc is so high. I just rinse & reuse? Saving probably $5/mo. Switching from Lysol wipes to a spray bottle is another $5.
Buying the larger size of things and portioning yourself is a big one, too. Snack size bags of nuts? Bag ‘em up yourself for half the price.
Quickest way to cut down fast (imo) is to meal plan. Make a big batch of your fav soup and have it two days per week with a salad or some bread. Cheap cheap cheap. Also rice, beans, lentils mixed into regular meals can make your expensive meal items go further. Try lentils with taco seasoning and have taco night. Also ridiculously cheap!
Start eating plain vegetables, legumes , and I’d throw in eggs, and Aldi will cut that budget by more than half.
And download apps from your nearby stores so it’s easy to make lists comprised solely of sale items. Example — I am kind of addicted to grapefruit juice but it can be $4.50 even at Walmart sometimes, whereas shoprite regularly runs sales of different brands of citrus juices where it will cost $2.50 to 2.99 so I always buy four at a clip. but these are only a few tips. your food budget is so off the charts high you could probably cut it in half simply by looking at item prices before carting them.
My partner and I are vegetarian and budget $480-500/month for groceries (specifically food). We shop at Aldi. We eat a lot of dishes with beans (both canned and dried). The instant pot is a super easy way to make healthy food easily and on a budget. I make a huge pot of soup or sweet potato and black bean chili on Sundays and when we are in a hurry or too lazy to cook dinner during the week, we have that. I have found some amazing recipes on NY Times Cooking. We wash and cut fruit and vegetables. We do not buy bottled water or other packaged drinks.
Shop food in season or frozen. You don’t need four punnets of berries for your smoothies, buy a packet of frozen mixed berries. Use up your vegetables before buying more – nothing is allowed to be pushed to the back of the fridge. Soup is your friend. Add bread, potatoes or rice to your soup to make it filling while getting carbs.
No more separate meals, your partner can add their dairy or eggs to their food separately but cooking separate meals all the time adds up.
Going further, you can grow your own vegetables or visit farmer markets. If your in a place with winter, canning is an interesting hobby that can go a long way to reduce costs in winter months.
Search out ethnic supermarkets. Asian, Persian, Mexican… Fruits and vegetables are not as pretty but just as good and cheap.
There are ways to make almost everything reusable and cheaper. It may be a higher initial cost, but if taken care of will save money over all. If you can’t sew, etsy and probably amazon have “un-paper” towels to replace paper towels, having a reusable spray bottle for cleaner and getting tab refills or a bulk container of the cleaning product will be way cheaper than the individual bottles. Getting a water filter jug, or if you have the money a whole home water filter cuts out the need for plastic water bottles. Soda stream is cheaper than cans, and if you’re a bit handy, you can order the CO2 containers that the restaurants use for fountain drinks and connect it to your soda stream (do so at your own risk, I’m not responsible for anything that might happen). There are reusable menstruation products, and some have even started using reusable toilet paper (cloths that are used, washed and used again like cloth diapers.) If you’re able to, vertical hydroponic gardening can yield a ton of produce in a very small area and requires no soil. Things like aluminum foil or parchment paper can be replaced with silicone baking mats. There is more, but this is what I could think of off the top of my head.
I’m literally planting a small orchard, planted berry bushes and grape vines and building vegetable gardens for the future. If that goes well going to also get some backyard chickens. They are going to continue to screw us over on food prices because they can. We let companies get too consolidated so they don’t even have to compete anymore.
Paper products are so expensive now. I was shocked that my parents are paying $30 for a big pack of TP or paper towels. Obviously the TP is non-negotiable, but I cut down my cleaning budget by using rags or other reusables for most of my routine cleaning and only using paper towels for icky jobs (wiping up grease, cleaning toilet, anything I wouldn’t want in the washing machine, basically).
Obviously that won’t make a big dent in your budget – you’re going to have to look at the receipts to really understand what’s going on there.
We have almost completely stopped shopping at ‘standard’ grocery stores (like Publix/Harris Teeter/Kroger/Target). Even with coupons here and there, the prices are so high in the first place it doesn’t make much of an impact. We recently gave up our Costco membership as we also didn’t see any real savings here when compared with cheaper grocery stores. Now we shop mainly Lidl or Aldi and it has a huge impact on our overall total.
I’d also try and calculate how much you are spending PER MEAL. The baseline is to be cheaper than takeout before tips and tax. The goal is to keep it at 40-50% of that baseline. The ideal case is keep it below 30% of that baseline.
I would look at Asian vegetarian meals if you aren’t already. Cultures with Buddhist and Hindu traditions will have lots of soy based recipes, with ingredients you can get at Asian grocery stores. For example, the soy milk there would be fresher, cheaper, and filler free. There are also many textures made out of tofu. Lots of dehydrated ingredients in dry sections of the store. Mushrooms are meaty and also waaay cheaper, especially oyster and enoki mushrooms. Look at Chinese, Taiwanese, Indian, Japanese, Tibetan, Nepalese vegan and vegetarian recipes.
You should try splitting into two categories if it isn’t too much trouble – food and household/hygiene products. Determining what you are actually spending on food can help you find a way to save if you can. I shop Aldi for fresh stuff and weekly sales at other grocery stores. Your total seems very high since you are not buying meat. We buy a decent amount of meat and I think I could keep food costs below $500 for two. $100-200 should be enough for household/personal goods. But I’m seeing the inflation more and more lately for essentials too and it varies on your location.
I try to buy paper/household goods in bulk. Costco, BJs, or Sam’s are all good options, whatever is nearby. I try to wait until there is a sale or coupon to stock up on essentials. Cleaning supplies have gone up so much, so I buy store brands whenever possible. Costco’s Kirkland blue dish soap is just as good as dawn. I prefer their dishwasher pods to the name brand ones too.
I’ve started using frozen fruits and vegetables more often than fresh for smoothies and cooked meals. Organic and impossible meats will really drain your budget. I also meal plan based on what is cheap at the grocery store, and after living in my neighborhood for +7 years I’ve gotten used to knowing where to get what for cheap. It’s never a one stop shop deal. I also don’t use feminine products (invested in thinx underwear and diva cup 7 years ago and never looked back), buy all my toiletries, vitamins and shampoo products in bulk from Costco or whenever they’re on sale. Total a month I probably spend $400 on groceries as a single woman in NYC.
“Breakfast for dinner” is a thing in my house. Pancakes and hash browns fill you up pretty well.
Another thing that helps is doing purchases in your supermarket website/app. It’s kind of a game, you keep adding stuff and make sure it doesn’t go above your allocated budget. Here in my city, there are stores which doing a purchase online and doing a curb pickup won’t charge you any additional amount. And this is an extra advantage, because there will be no temptation of buying extra items if you just go and get everything loaded up in your car!
ShopRite has been the best overall for us. Get the app, download the digital coupons, shop the sales and stock up on staples when they go on sale – as an example every so often they’ll sell the solid white bumble bee for 85 cents a can and you can get as many as 40, not saying you need that many but you can stock up to suit your needs. Also they do curbside pickup on online orders for a flat $5 fee which saves time in the store and keeps you from throwing random crap in the card. You get all the coupons etc as well on the online orders.
If you are buying lots of Impossible or other faux meat products it adds up. I have been Vegan for 22 years and try to avoid more than 2 meals a week with faux meat. I don’t count tofu in that equation or soy curls. But yeah life is expensive
Learn how to cook Cajun food. It’s delicious, filling, and cheap af to make.
Consider getting a credit card with cashback. It’s not much but it’s a way to get at least 1% back on your purchases.
Our combined food bill is about 400/month right now. 37/38. I’m 9 months pregnant.
Breakfast is usually yoghurt and fruit or toast with peanut butter and honey or rice with eggs and kimchi.
Lunch is usually quesadillas or curry and rice or leftover pizza or a salad
Dinner is usually something like spaghetti with meatballs and salad and bread, or chicken chili with cornbread or enchiladas and rice and beans, etc
These are meals for this particular season
I buy in bulk from Costco, get veg at the local Asian or Mexican grocer and get salsas and extras at trader joes.
Personal finance expert Orford opened up to Bored Panda that saving money at the grocery store is as important to him today as ever.
"To maximize savings, I find it's always best to start with a weekly meal plan. Planning for breakfasts, lunches, and dinners—and then reconciling that with my budget sets the foundation for good planning," he explained to us in an email.
"I like to watch what's on sale this week and plan meals around that. Doing so allows me to have a variety of meals while saving money," Orford said.
"For example, this week, whole chickens are on sale, so I'll buy 2 or 3 and make different meals with them to eat in the next few days or freeze them for another time."
One slightly counterintuitive-sounding tactic that Orford uses is shopping at not more than 2 or 3 grocery stores.
"Doing so allows me to leverage the grocery store loyalty programs while watching for pricing. One store might be great for bulk meats, while another may have a better loyalty program. Others might be better for 'store brands,'" he explained his reasoning to Bored Panda.
According_Gazelle472:
I do this every week .I take the envelope and only use what is in there .Each envelope has 50 dollars in it this month and that is it.
"For example, no-name brands are often (not always) just as good as the big labels—yet cost significantly less. Trust me, no-name rice and beans will taste the same as something with a fancy name and box," Orford pointed out.
"And lastly, if there's a particularly good sale on nonperishables or supplies (think toiletries, cleaning supplies, etc.), don't hesitate to buy 6 months or 1 year's worth! If my usual bath soap costs $3.99 and it's on sale for $1.99, why not buy 12?" the personal finance expert urged customers to consider buying discounted goods in bulk.
Use your freezer. One or two portions left of that dinner from 2 nights ago? Freeze it. Easy, free dinner when you don’t feel like cooking. Look up how to make things stay fresh. Herbs and vegetables are things you should never throw out! Celery and carrots for example, I almost never use up the 1lb bags they come in. Properly washing, trimming, and storing in water that you change out every so often will keep them fresh for weeks. Average household food waste is crazy high. Most households can save 20% just from that.
USA Today reports that the average American household spends over $1,000 per month on groceries. Inflation, supply-chain issues, and increased demand are to blame. However, food costs also depend quite a bit on the size of the household, as well as what part of the US someone lives in.
For example, the average American family spends $270 per week (around $1,080 per month) on groceries. Meanwhile, families with kids spend around $331 per week (more than $1,324 per month) at the grocery store.
Start with eliminating any beverages. Water is enough. Buy no frills store brands. Don’t buy precut fruit. Cut it yourself. Don’t buy premade meals. Use the store app and upload coupons beforehand. Each week shop the sales and stock up on items that way.
I also make a lot of stuff from scratch like breads and pizza and cookies, which saves a ton of money.
Meanwhile, if you live in pricier states, your grocery bill is also going to look bigger. For instance, the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey for October 18-30, 2023, showed that the average California household buys groceries for around $297 every week (roughly $1,188 per month). Americans living in Nevada aren’t far behind: they spend $294 per week ($1,176+ per month).
However, if you live in Iowa, Nebraska, Michigan, or Indiana, you’re probably spending less than $240 per week (around $960 per month) at your local grocery store.
It does help that when school is in session, my kids' schools provide lunches on school days. Occasionally my kids pack their lunches.
Generally, I do the following:
I meal plan every week. I cook from scratch almost every night. I online shop at Walmart to save time. I do not buy premade anything. Vegetables and fruits are fresh or frozen. No desserts premade. No smoothie mixes, no chips, no sodas, no prepackaged snack foods. Very rarely do I buy sandwich meat.
I refuse to buy name brand. I compare price per ounce on everything (easy to do on Walmart's website). I don't buy the expensive cuts of meat. We eat a lot of meatless dishes. We eat leftovers. We eat breakfast for supper.
From time to time when I'm motivated, I meal prep a couple meals over the weekend to save time. Sometimes I make a double batch and freeze half (tonight we're having lentil chili from the freezer that I made three weeks ago).
Once the week's money is spent, it's spent, and we make do with what we have.
Naturally, everyone wants to put food on the table for their family. Ideally, that food is going to be fresh, nutritious, healthy, and cheap. However, high-quality ingredients can be quite expensive. So, you need to hunt for in-season groceries to keep the costs down. Buying food in bulk and then freezing it can also help keep your wallet happier.
If you find yourself really hard-pressed budget-wise, you need to take a detailed look at your expenses. Analyze what types of food items you’re spending the most money on. For example, you might find that you’re a huge meat-eater. However, quality red meat can be pricey. So going meatless even for one additional day every week can make your grocery budget go further.
Similarly, you might realize that you’re spending large chunks of your hard-earned cash on snacks, sodas, and processed food. Everyone needs a tasty little treat to reward themselves every now and then. But if you’re rewarding yourself all the time, it might mean that you’re stretching your budget to its limit. Not to mention that overindulging in junk food is going to wreck your health.
They not only provide food but they have diapers and pull ups for my kids as well as free menstrual products and a large selection of books for both kids and adults.
At our food bank we are provided with a cart and allowed to go “shopping”; fresh fruits and vegetables are always available as are eggs, breads, rolls, biscuits, milk, some type of meat (ground beef, chicken, etc), frozen foods (usually frozen pizzas or different types of fish) and then random stuff in a cooler that you can pick items out of, as well as baked goods (pies, donuts, cookies, cakes, etc).
This week, they had bouquets of flowers they were giving out to each family; it may sound silly, but being able to brighten my kitchen up with flowers that I normally wouldn’t have been able to purchase has been very mood boosting.
Edit: I live in a HCOL city (Vancouver, BC) and my husband and I spend about $800 a month on groceries (excluding personal care items). We eat meat and dairy, although we eat a lot of vegetarian/vegan meals due to rising cost of animal products.
Look for staples in cheaper places, for instance buy rice in 25kg bags at an asian market way cheaper than the grocery stores. The key to saving in the modern capitalistic market is to have the willingness to walk away, and to do that you need to be flexible. If you just have to have a specific item a specific way on a specific day you will pay dearly for it.
Going for a cheeky fast food meal is getting more expensive, too. CNN Business’ Allison Morrow reports that many Americans are disappointed by the constantly rising prices at McDonald’s. Grocery prices rose 1.3% in 2023. However, they were dwarfed by the rising costs of dining out, which rose 5.2% that same year.
The CEO of McDonald’s, Chris Kempczinski, recently pointed out that “eating at home has become more affordable.” Things have gotten so bad that customers have taken to social media and TikTok to voice their concerns. Some people have gone viral for calling out McDonald’s for serving $3 hash browns in some of its locations. Food prices vary a lot depending on what restaurant you visit.
In this context, cooking at home using cheaper ingredients that are in season sounds like a far better alternative than relying on fast food.
Then there are things of habit - using a hand towel instead of paper towel for drying off clean things can cut your usage to a fraction. Say, $5/mo. Same with ziplocks - the volume of these I use for dry goods like open bags of chips, bread, etc is so high. I just rinse & reuse? Saving probably $5/mo. Switching from Lysol wipes to a spray bottle is another $5.
Buying the larger size of things and portioning yourself is a big one, too. Snack size bags of nuts? Bag ‘em up yourself for half the price.
Quickest way to cut down fast (imo) is to meal plan. Make a big batch of your fav soup and have it two days per week with a salad or some bread. Cheap cheap cheap. Also rice, beans, lentils mixed into regular meals can make your expensive meal items go further. Try lentils with taco seasoning and have taco night. Also ridiculously cheap!
Start eating plain vegetables, legumes , and I'd throw in eggs, and Aldi will cut that budget by more than half.
And download apps from your nearby stores so it's easy to make lists comprised solely of sale items. Example -- I am kind of addicted to grapefruit juice but it can be $4.50 even at Walmart sometimes, whereas shoprite regularly runs sales of different brands of citrus juices where it will cost $2.50 to 2.99 so I always buy four at a clip. but these are only a few tips. your food budget is so off the charts high you could probably cut it in half simply by looking at item prices before carting them.
My partner and I are vegetarian and budget $480-500/month for groceries (specifically food). We shop at Aldi. We eat a lot of dishes with beans (both canned and dried). The instant pot is a super easy way to make healthy food easily and on a budget. I make a huge pot of soup or sweet potato and black bean chili on Sundays and when we are in a hurry or too lazy to cook dinner during the week, we have that. I have found some amazing recipes on NY Times Cooking. We wash and cut fruit and vegetables. We do not buy bottled water or other packaged drinks.
Shop food in season or frozen. You don't need four punnets of berries for your smoothies, buy a packet of frozen mixed berries. Use up your vegetables before buying more - nothing is allowed to be pushed to the back of the fridge. Soup is your friend. Add bread, potatoes or rice to your soup to make it filling while getting carbs.
No more separate meals, your partner can add their dairy or eggs to their food separately but cooking separate meals all the time adds up.
Going further, you can grow your own vegetables or visit farmer markets. If your in a place with winter, canning is an interesting hobby that can go a long way to reduce costs in winter months.
Search out ethnic supermarkets. Asian, Persian, Mexican… Fruits and vegetables are not as pretty but just as good and cheap.
There are ways to make almost everything reusable and cheaper. It may be a higher initial cost, but if taken care of will save money over all. If you can't sew, etsy and probably amazon have "un-paper" towels to replace paper towels, having a reusable spray bottle for cleaner and getting tab refills or a bulk container of the cleaning product will be way cheaper than the individual bottles. Getting a water filter jug, or if you have the money a whole home water filter cuts out the need for plastic water bottles. Soda stream is cheaper than cans, and if you're a bit handy, you can order the CO2 containers that the restaurants use for fountain drinks and connect it to your soda stream (do so at your own risk, I'm not responsible for anything that might happen). There are reusable menstruation products, and some have even started using reusable toilet paper (cloths that are used, washed and used again like cloth diapers.) If you're able to, vertical hydroponic gardening can yield a ton of produce in a very small area and requires no soil. Things like aluminum foil or parchment paper can be replaced with silicone baking mats. There is more, but this is what I could think of off the top of my head.
I'm literally planting a small orchard, planted berry bushes and grape vines and building vegetable gardens for the future. If that goes well going to also get some backyard chickens. They are going to continue to screw us over on food prices because they can. We let companies get too consolidated so they don't even have to compete anymore.
Paper products are so expensive now. I was shocked that my parents are paying $30 for a big pack of TP or paper towels. Obviously the TP is non-negotiable, but I cut down my cleaning budget by using rags or other reusables for most of my routine cleaning and only using paper towels for icky jobs (wiping up grease, cleaning toilet, anything I wouldn't want in the washing machine, basically).
Obviously that won't make a big dent in your budget - you're going to have to look at the receipts to really understand what's going on there.
We have almost completely stopped shopping at ‘standard’ grocery stores (like Publix/Harris Teeter/Kroger/Target). Even with coupons here and there, the prices are so high in the first place it doesn’t make much of an impact. We recently gave up our Costco membership as we also didn’t see any real savings here when compared with cheaper grocery stores. Now we shop mainly Lidl or Aldi and it has a huge impact on our overall total.
I’d also try and calculate how much you are spending PER MEAL. The baseline is to be cheaper than takeout before tips and tax. The goal is to keep it at 40-50% of that baseline. The ideal case is keep it below 30% of that baseline.
I would look at Asian vegetarian meals if you aren't already. Cultures with Buddhist and Hindu traditions will have lots of soy based recipes, with ingredients you can get at Asian grocery stores. For example, the soy milk there would be fresher, cheaper, and filler free. There are also many textures made out of tofu. Lots of dehydrated ingredients in dry sections of the store. Mushrooms are meaty and also waaay cheaper, especially oyster and enoki mushrooms. Look at Chinese, Taiwanese, Indian, Japanese, Tibetan, Nepalese vegan and vegetarian recipes.
You should try splitting into two categories if it isn’t too much trouble - food and household/hygiene products. Determining what you are actually spending on food can help you find a way to save if you can. I shop Aldi for fresh stuff and weekly sales at other grocery stores. Your total seems very high since you are not buying meat. We buy a decent amount of meat and I think I could keep food costs below $500 for two. $100-200 should be enough for household/personal goods. But I’m seeing the inflation more and more lately for essentials too and it varies on your location.
I try to buy paper/household goods in bulk. Costco, BJs, or Sam’s are all good options, whatever is nearby. I try to wait until there is a sale or coupon to stock up on essentials. Cleaning supplies have gone up so much, so I buy store brands whenever possible. Costco’s Kirkland blue dish soap is just as good as dawn. I prefer their dishwasher pods to the name brand ones too.
I’ve started using frozen fruits and vegetables more often than fresh for smoothies and cooked meals. Organic and impossible meats will really drain your budget. I also meal plan based on what is cheap at the grocery store, and after living in my neighborhood for +7 years I’ve gotten used to knowing where to get what for cheap. It’s never a one stop shop deal. I also don’t use feminine products (invested in thinx underwear and diva cup 7 years ago and never looked back), buy all my toiletries, vitamins and shampoo products in bulk from Costco or whenever they’re on sale. Total a month I probably spend $400 on groceries as a single woman in NYC.
“Breakfast for dinner” is a thing in my house. Pancakes and hash browns fill you up pretty well.
Another thing that helps is doing purchases in your supermarket website/app. It's kind of a game, you keep adding stuff and make sure it doesn't go above your allocated budget. Here in my city, there are stores which doing a purchase online and doing a curb pickup won't charge you any additional amount. And this is an extra advantage, because there will be no temptation of buying extra items if you just go and get everything loaded up in your car!
ShopRite has been the best overall for us. Get the app, download the digital coupons, shop the sales and stock up on staples when they go on sale - as an example every so often they’ll sell the solid white bumble bee for 85 cents a can and you can get as many as 40, not saying you need that many but you can stock up to suit your needs. Also they do curbside pickup on online orders for a flat $5 fee which saves time in the store and keeps you from throwing random crap in the card. You get all the coupons etc as well on the online orders.
If you are buying lots of Impossible or other faux meat products it adds up. I have been Vegan for 22 years and try to avoid more than 2 meals a week with faux meat. I don’t count tofu in that equation or soy curls. But yeah life is expensive
Learn how to cook Cajun food. It’s delicious, filling, and cheap af to make.
Consider getting a credit card with cashback. It's not much but it's a way to get at least 1% back on your purchases.
Our combined food bill is about 400/month right now. 37/38. I'm 9 months pregnant.
Breakfast is usually yoghurt and fruit or toast with peanut butter and honey or rice with eggs and kimchi.
Lunch is usually quesadillas or curry and rice or leftover pizza or a salad
Dinner is usually something like spaghetti with meatballs and salad and bread, or chicken chili with cornbread or enchiladas and rice and beans, etc
These are meals for this particular season
I buy in bulk from Costco, get veg at the local Asian or Mexican grocer and get salsas and extras at trader joes.
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