My family (Mom, Dad, and two pups including yours truly) spends roughly $800 to $1000 dollars a month on groceries. As more than one member of our pack has asserted, “life is too short for bad food and mean people”. We eat three- or four-course home-cooked meals daily and keep plenty of food in the pantry, enjoy a lot of fish and fresh meat/veggies/fruits, etc - minimal prepackaged food, cuz we’re all spoiled.
Well, I say “we” but mean “they” since I live on campus…
If we need to save money we’d rather shut off the heat than go without our good food lol
Are those numbers right? Are you really including the water in those figures? Because at $5/case, you are spending about 1/2-1/3 of your budget on that bottled water.
The numbers are correct, but we don’t spend $5/case – we spend between $3.50-4.00/case – which isn’t much better, but there it is. It is a very large part of our budget, for sure.
Weird. I’m going to look again into our numbers. We eat simple meals from basic stores. Aldi or the ethnic store, or Albert Heijn, the Dutch equivalent of Safeways.
We eat little meat, virtually no alcohol, and not much convenience stuff. We buy organic meat and eggs, but that can’t make up the difference, as we don’t eat much of either.
Maybe there’s some difference between Netherlands and US. I’ll be back with more info.
We don’t spend that much, about $250 per month for 2 adults and 2 toddlers. Include eating out it’s maybe $350. We eat quite well, a lot of organic food, fresh vegetables and prime cuts of meat. My wife is an amazing shopper though and figures out the deals. A few times she’s went shopping and brought back $100 of groceries that only cost her a few dollars.
We budget $200 a month for one big monthly Trader Joe’s run. Then $150 twice a month for two trips monthly trips to Shop Rite. We buy organic produce, imported cheeses, nice cuts of meat and good quality chocolate. So $500 to feed two adults, one small child and two cats.
I also unashamedly budget $200 for eating out.
We will wear clothes from garage sales and use the library as a primary form of entertainment but we like to eat well.
$200 for a single person + 2 cats. Litter is included in that figure, but not cat food.
I basically eat out maybe once a month, max. All other meals, breakfast, lunch, and dinner are homemade.
One small savings is the fact that I work in a building that has 16 floors of awesomely filled kitchens. My soda, fruit, and soy milk expenses have dropped since working here.
Dang, I need to rethink how much I spend on food. I’d say it’s about $300 a month on groceries that mostly rot and get thrown away for me and the boyfriend and around $600 a month for restaurants. No wonder we rarely get to go on vacations! That’s it, I’m budgeting.
Well, I’m only allowed to put down 50 hours a month, cause I work for a college radio station. But I do waaaay more than is necessary, 'cause it’s a learning experience, for various reasons, and it’s a job of love. So while I “work” only 10 hours a week, that can go as high as 20 or 30 hours, especially if I have a lot of design work to do that week. I have a good quality of life, though, so I’m not worried about changing it at the moment.
And yea, I shop at Aldi. That place is insanely cheap.
My Dad does that. We never, ever buy dish soap, toilet paper, or tissue. My Mum phones and begs us to take some of it. He had a lemon meringue pie thing a few years ago that actually got painful. It was five years before I could eat the stuff again.
Us, we spend about $400/month for two adults, a one-year-old, and two cats. About $250-$300/month at Costco, the rest at other grocery stores, locally. I am a fanatic baker, and tend to bulk cook, but also have an unhealthy love of grocery shopping, especially in ethnic grocery stores.
I would say maybe $200 a month for 2 people. During my unemployed days I learned how to make filling and delicious food cheaply. Potatoes, eggs, onions, garlic, bacon, and spaghetti can get you farther than most people give them credit for.
Have you considered Brita pitchers? We have the stank of the well water, too. Goddamn nasty, smelly, awful-tasting rusty water. We’ve been doing the Brita thing for a little over a year and it is both economical and eco-friendlier than bottled.
It depends on how well I’m following a plan. If I have planned my menus well during the month, I’ll usually only have to spend about $300 to $350 for two adults, one toddler and two cats. That’s because I will have incorporated well those items I already have on hand and would only need to go to the grocery only weekly to pick up veggies and fruits. Plus, when I plan well, I usually cook in advance for the week, so everything has been thought out beforehand and it’s ready so I don’t even have to think about how long it takes to make a meal - it’s already ready.
If I don’t have a menu planned out, haven’t made a weekly grocery pilgrimage or haven’t made time to cook in advance, I can run upwards of $500 a month for all of us because I’ll have to think up on my way home from work what we should eat and, if it’s not something I can put together in 20 minutes while juggling a toddler, I’ll often stop and get something that’s easier like a roast chicken and salad. It costs me more to buy just a few things on the fly because I always see something else I need or want and pick it up whereas if I have a list and a plan, that doesn’t happen. Or I don’t even need to go to the grocery in the first place because I already have everything.
I budget $250 a month for myself and the two kids, plus another $85 for pet food (it actually lasts 5-6 weeks)…if things are tight, I incorporate it all into the $250. I’m trying to cut down, though, so we can save more.
I love to find a bargain, so I hit the grocery stores a couple of times each week, just looking for nearly expired sell-by goodies. Usually I can find a bunch–I almost never pay more than $1/gallon for milk, and I load up on kids’ yogurt treats (6 packs or gogurt types) for less than that. Same with lunch meat and chicken, and a few weeks ago I bought 12 pounds of thinly-sliced flank steaks for .99/pound.
I also try to go past the bread outlet, where I can get 12-grain bread for .79 a loaf. I love the stuff but who wants to pay 4 bucks for bread?!
karol
