One of our goals this spring is to learn to be frugal when it comes to food.
My wife Hilary is great at this. She uses E-Mealz online meal planning to plan out meals based on sales at the grocery store. She follows blogs that help her to maximize her savings with coupons and help her to get free things at CVS using "extra care bucks". At some point she will write some posts about how she does that and how you can too! She saves a lot of money.
We have a LOT of changes to make in our food budget though. The first change is to actually STICK to our budget. We eat out a lot (mostly for lunches, snacking, and when we are together on the weekends).
Here are the startling "approximate" numbers for what we've spend on food (eat out and grocery). This also includes toiletries, minor shopping at Target/Walmart, and CVS.
July 09 - $1140
August 09 - $1280
Sept 09 - $1290
Oct 09 - $1000
Nov 09 - $765 (from Mint.com)
Dec 09 - $860 (from Mint.com)
Jan 10 - $290 (so far on Mint.com)
Dave Ramsey recommends that food/dining be about 5%-15% of your income. Our budget for January food and dining is $500. As you can see we are halfway through our budget, but we are not even half way through the month! We have a lot of learning and tough choices to make in this category. It has been said that people can loose weight while on the Total Money Makeover. I wouldn't mind that!
Hopefully we will meet our food budget this month. If we do, then February will be lowered to $450. We will work to get this as low as we can.
THIS my friends is how you pay off debt with Gazelle Intensity. Beans and rice as Dave Ramsey says. Rice and gravy if you get bored.
2 comments:
When we first started on the Dave Ramsey plan, it made me sick to my stomach to see how much money we had been blowing on food every month - because of eating out. I saw one of your recent posts about EMealz, and I've used it to, and it's WONDERFUL. Brown bagging lunch has helped too. The biggest thing that has helped us cut our food budget was that we set aside a little extra money for a couple of months and finally bought a deep freezer. We buy stuff in bulk at Sams club now. Instead of ordering Dominos when we feel like pizza, we have a Digorno frozen pizza, which cost about $4 ($12 for a 3 pack at Sams). I also stock up on bread at the bread store, and freeze it. buying meats in large packages and freezing in smaller poortions ha been great too.
The hardest time I'm still having is getting fresh veggies when I need them. You just about have to buy them the same day you're going to use them, which is a total inconvenience for me. Good luck sticking to your food budget this month!
Hey Amanda, we too have greatly benefited from E-mealz. It helps us to plan meals and most of the time we have leftovers for the next day's lunch. We have a deep freezer too and that helps. We were really bad about having a cabinet and freezer full of food but never really using it all. Our goal is to find a use for every food item and use it. There are so many "meals" just stored up in the cabinets and freezer but we just have to figure out what to make and use it all wisely. The goal is to have all of our food eaten and gone before we move so that we don't have to worry about a cabinet and freezer full of food.
As my most recent post says, we have already gone over our eat out budget for the month. It is a learning process for us but we are doing better than we used to.
I want to eventually, soon, move to an envelope cash method for our eat out budget. It's the only area that we really struggle and that will help us control it.
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