I’ve had more time to peruse blogs lately and have been finding some really great and inspirational ones. But I just ran across one that is so inspiring and amazing, I just HAVE to share it!
ThirtyFiveByNinety posted this blog post about their grocery shopping goals and how theie goal is to spend no more than $25 per week on food. So far this month, their total grocery bill has been under $42! They’ve been accomplishing this by shopping sales, bulk, farmer’s markets, gardening, bartering etc.
Since we’re trying to cut our expenses back in order to save more for our Five Year Plan, this is really intriguing. I thought I was doing good with shopping every two weeks and meal planning with our bill averaging under $100 a week. Granted, I don’t have the local resources they do – like a nearby dairy farm. But there must be ways I can do better. And now that I know someone else has it figured out, I’m more inspired to do the same!
Some ideas I’ve been throwing around include: more vegetarian and vegan meals each week (we’ve really slacked in this area), buying in bulk from Azure Standard, finding more cupboard space to “put by” more sales, actually shopping those sales. (Yes, I should already be shopping sales. But until recently the only grocery stores nearby were never cheaper than Trader Joe’s, so it was never worth it. Now that we have a Fresh ‘N Easy and a Sunflower Market nearby, I need to shop around more.)
And of course, when we have our garden growing that will supply alot.
I also found this blog, 5DollarDinners.com but at $5 a meal, the post above is still way ahead. (Still it may help me, except where their meal ideas are not up to our dietary standards. Health is one area in which to not scrimp for us.)
So, now I’m curious what others have been doing to save on their grocery bill? Please share! I need all the ideas I can get!
I'm Tara Wagner, life coach and creator of the Digging Deep process, where I coach women out of survival mode to recreate their lives and families.
Definitely, buying in bulk and stocking up on sale items. Also, buying big bags of flour and doing our own baking–bread, cookies, etc.–as much as possible or almost exclusively. I won’t skimp on health, either, so I do pay $6 for the organic butter from grassfed cows, instead of $3 for conventional butter. I just feel the vitamins in the grassfed stuff, and the lack of chemicals in a fat we use a lot of is very important since the fat is where pesticides, etc. get stored…
I could get better at this, too. thanks for the links!
Ground turkey is healthy and versatile and cheaper than some of the other meats.
Also, “beans and rice” is one of the cheapest (and still very healthy) meals that I can think of. Cook them in a crockpot! Beans/peas are also very easy to grow in your garden!
http://www.hillbillyhousewife.com/40dollarmenu.htm
has a $45 week “emergency menu”. While some of the things are probably not something most of us would eat regularly, some of the ideas are very useful.
Read up on some of the tactics the grocery stores (yes, even the wonderful organic stores!) use to get us to buy things we don’t need and then you can be better prepared when you enter in.
I agree with you that farmers markes rock! You can also go to localharvest.org and find local gardeners that sale their surplus veggies from their home garden.
I am horrible at the moment with saving on groceries, if we want it we get it has been the way since we have been transitioning. It is a very BAD way to shop. That said I am impressed with your links and the stores you mentioned. I need to shop around and find stores that work for my needs. Trader Joes is always a winner but the Sunflower Market looks awesome. Ive seen the Fresh and Easy’s around but have yet to go in one. Good luck and post any more great information you come across.
Buy meat directly from a farmer. That saved us thousands of dollars a year AND we eat meat MORE not less. Huh.
Our garden has been the biggest saver. We froze berries in the summer, canned and froze tomatoes, froze green beans and apples, canned apples, canned pears, ect. This year our crop in teh city failed but lots of our country friends gave us their surplus.
Bake your own bread. Artisan bread in 5 minutes a day is a great resource.
We have an emergency menu too, but to us it means, “oops, nobody thawed meat, yikes!”.
We got rid of the microwave and save about 400$/year in electricty.
Family wipes.
No shampoo, baking soda and vinegar instead.
I’ll come back and add if I think of what else we’ve been doing…….
Oh, make your own butter from organic cream!
Not 6$ a lb!
Such awesome comments!! My mind is reeling with ideas.
LisaZ: The main thing we don’t homebake anymore is bread. I really need to get back to doing it. I just suck at it. Big time. And I love me some bread so crappy tasting bread doesn’t fly around here.
Anon: That link rocks! Lots of great ideas for dinners and lunches too. DH’s lunches are a big $$ drain right now.
SJS: Fresh ‘N Easy doesn’t have everything but they do carry…well, fresh and easy stuff. lol Watch their sale ads. They had avocados 4 for $1 last week and I missed it!! I’m told they were gooood.
MamaP: The only meat I can get from a farmer is $3 a lb, slightly more expensive than TJ’s prices, which I can get at $1.89 lb. Maybe I’ll shop around a bit more though and see what I can find. Need to plug in the freezer and make sure it still works…
$400 a year on microwaving?!?! Yikes! I don’t know how much we use it but it sure would be intersting to find out. Do you spend more to run your oven now?
Please do share more if you think of it. I’m brainstorming ideas and going to try to implement them this week when I shop tomorrow!
We are a family of 2 adults and a 6yr old with a weekly grocery budget of $120/wk. I feel lucky in that our urban homestead is located withing 5 mins of 2 large chain grocery stores and a Farmers Co-Op. We currently do about 90% of our shopping at the Farmers Co-Op and buy local and organic wherever possible. We will hit the other stores if they have sales on staples we need to stock up on.
With a proper healthy meal plan, home cooking and following sales we’ve not only been able to beat our budget every week, but also start a surplus pantry that should support our meal plans for a month and growing. We basically shop a month in advance now picking our weekly meal plans from the pantry and rotate our new purchases, minus fresh produce etc…
I believe it all comes down to planning and organization. In our case in Eastern Canada we can’t grow many veggies in the winter, although I am trying cold frame gardening, so canning and preserves keep us over the winter months.
Plans for this 2009 are to build a root cellar/cold room in our basement to hold more preserves, grow extra produce this summer for canning, pant more berries and fruits for preserves, buy a used deep freezer and buy bulk beef/porc/chicken meet from our local farmers.
Nice information and blog … will visit often ;o)
We only used the microwave to defrost things and occasionally popcorn. We already didn’t use it for easy meals or drink heating. So the 400$ was basically so we could have a clock in the kitchen and thaw juice twice a week! LOL
Our local meat people are organic, but it comes out at $1.60 a lb for pork, less than that for beef. About 6$ a chicken still, but we are going to raise our own.
That’s Iowa, but they charge us market weight price (live weight on the pig and hanging on the beef) and that’s a national standard as far as I know. We buy whole animals (1/2 beef) so that may be the difference. These same farmers mark up the prices A LOT at the market stand.
This may sound strange and you may not be able to do this: Since we started living on the farm we have to burn our trash. That means we have to really think about what gets burned and what goes to town for recycle since I really don’t want to burn plastic. Our trash/recycle bins have washable PUL diaper pail liners. We buy very little that ends up having to be hauled to the dump now. Compost, burn, recycle. In the city, what we burn would likely be recycled too, but we just threw away metal, plastics, and most paper.
Water. Out here we don’t pay for sewer but that means we have to be extra careful what chemicals get used and flushed.
PUL snack bags and lunch bags. A local mama makes them and sells them cheap. No more ziplocks for snacks and lunches! We still need them for freezer storage…….
Wildcrafting. Many of our local parks and roadways have gooseberries, blackberries, greens, and apple trees that are free for the picking. Pears, grapes, and apples were giving away at a local nursing home because they had too many and the trees were laden. We got seconds at the local berry farm.