Chocolate Vegetables’s Weblog

I have been reading around about how to reduce that horrible grocery bill. In our family of 5 with 1 in nappies and another only using a nappy at night I can tend to spend over $200 a week just at the supermarket. Sadly that doesn’t seem to cover every meal and we end up at the fast food places when my plans (?!) don’t work out.

This last week I planned out every meal and bought all that food. It was still over $220 at the supermarket but we didn’t have any fast food this week because I knew what we were eating and still had left to eat.

An idea I saw this last week was to divide the grocery money up into a few categories and track your spending for a few weeks. Once you can figure out how much you usually spend it is supposedly much easier to then gradually work on lowering some of the categories by changing
recipes or shopping more carefully.

So for this week here is the breakdown:

Fresh Produce $12.15
Meat $40.49
Household goods $43.27
Treats $21.55
Health and Hygiene $54.52
Dogs $9.08
Pantry supplies $29.30
Fridge/Frzr $11.69

Health and hygiene was huge because dh needed blades for his disposable razor for almost $15 for 4, ouch, and I am trying out a new supplement for the kids, especially my eldest, of Omega 3 etc which was $12.95.

Well, I guess I will post back as I do more shopping. At this stage this shop only officially covers 4 days of dinner and no real planning or shopping for lunches either. Ooops!

Total $222.05

Best wishes,
CV