I love a new month to have a fresh start! Our grocery budget has been creeping up lately and I’m determined to stop it!
I know I’m not the only one who feels like their grocery spending has gotten out of control. The difference is that I know better! I am a grocery savings expert with an online course all about how to save money on groceries. I just need to do better at following my own advice.
In my defense, with six busy kids (some of whom I homeschool part- or full-time, some who are very involved in high school sports), a refugee family that we sponsor (I babysit the 3-year-old, and chauffer the 12-year-old around like one of my own), and my own involvement in many different things, I am spread pretty thin sometimes.
Being busy either leads me to be very organized or totally floundering. Often I am organized, but lately I have let the crazy overcome my organization efforts.
I know that even with prices soaring, I can get our family’s grocery budget back down to what I think is reasonable for us.
Here are the 4 big things I’m going to do in March to bring our grocery spending back down:
1. Meal Plan
Meal planning alone will bring my grocery spending down tremendously! With my busy-ness and overwhelm, I haven’t pushed myself to meal plan, so dinners have often been thrown together or fend-for-yourself style. That is always more expensive (and way less interesting) than well-planned meals.
I will plan out four weeks of meals, but not assign the meals to days. I like the flexibility of deciding what I will make each day based on my schedule and mood, but the convenience of knowing that I have everything I need to make any of those meals on any given day.
2. Organized Monthly Grocery Shopping Trip
I am a big advocate of an organized monthly (or twice-monthly) grocery shopping trip. When we go to the store every week or multiple times a week, we always spend more and we don’t end up using most of what’s in the pantry or the freezer (I’ll talk about the freezer in just a second).
In order to have an organized monthly grocery shopping trip, I need to plan our meals out first! Then using my customizable digital/printable shopping list (available in my online shop), I highlight all of the items I need to get. I use one color for Winco and one color for Sam’s Club. For most items, I already know what store is the better deal. Plus, if I go to Winco first, I can easily look at the Sam’s Club app to compare prices while I’m in Winco.
3. Use up what’s in the freezer
I haven’t dug deep into my chest freezers in a while. I know there are random ingredients in there that will give me some inspiration for meal planning. I want to base our meals on things we already have and need to use.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I made a video of going through our chest freezer as I took inventory of our pantry and food storage. I’m considering doing another video, but it might be too embarrassing to show our seriously disorganized freezers. Somehow I wasn’t too embarrassed last time though! Here is that video:
Another reason to use up what’s in the freezer is so that I can start making freezer meals again! It is so, so wonderful to take a day or two and fill the freezer with homemade freezer meals. Last time, I had to stop short of my goal because I ran out of freezer space. My life goes so much more smoothly (and my family eats more exciting meals) when I have freezer meals on hand.
4. Make Bread
Making our own bread isn’t just about saving money (though at nearly $3 a loaf for the store-bought bread, it definitely saves money). Everyone LOVES homemade bread around here.
Back when we were paying of six figures of student loan debt, we would make our own bread instead of buying sandwich bread from the store. I even calculated the saving back then.
We haven’t regularly made all of our sandwich bread in ages. We still make our favorite Soft French Bread often to go with dinner, but I haven’t baked sandwich bread in forever.
If making bread isn’t your thing, don’t worry, there are plenty of other ways to save money. Don’t think you can’t seriously reduce your grocery spending if you can’t make your own bread.
For March, I (or one of my kids) will make all of our sandwich bread. This is no small task since our family of 8 eats LOTS of sandwiches!
Who’s with me?
Who else is interested in lowering their grocery spending in March? Let’s do this together! Share in the comments what you are going to do to make it happen!
If you want lots of help and direction to make serious changes in your grocery spending every single month, check out my course Grocery Budget Hero. Right now it’s available with pay-what-you-can pricing, so that it’s accessible to everyone!
Spending money on groceries for your family is an expense that comes up every single month, so learning how to really reduce what you spend on groceries pays off month after month!
