After rent, food makes up the largest part of our budget every month. In the past we haven’t worried too much about how much we spent at the grocery store, as long as we weren’t buying things that were ridiculously expensive like lobster or filet mignon. But with my wife’s layoff and the subsequent reduction in income, it makes sense for us to start paying attention to the choices we make when shopping, and putting a limit on how much we spend.
There is one major caveat for us though, and that is that quality is a priority. We would rather spend more money on food that’s tasty and healthy rather then spend less money on cheap processed junk food. If organic fruits and vegetables look better, we will buy those. On the other hand, sometimes the organic section is full of half rotten food, in which case we go with the non-organic. We like buying our meat and fish from Whole Foods when we can because the quality tends to be higher than what we can find at the Safeway or Costco in our area.
With that aside, here are the major steps for developing a food budget that you can stick with.
1. The first step is to figure out a monthly budget, then a weekly, and finally a daily. This will be the guide for planning your meals. Say for instance that you want to spend $700 a month on food. If your monthly budget is $700, your weekly budget would work out to $175, and your daily budget would work out to about $25 a day.
Take your daily budget, divide it by the number of meals in a day, and you have the rough cost per meal. In our example above, one meal should be about $8 total. One thing to keep in mind is that not all meals cost the same. I usually eat cereal in the morning, and the cost of milk and cereal for the week breakdown to less than $8 per day (It’s probably closer to $1 a day). This means that some meals, like dinner, can be more expensive than others.
2. Think of menus in 3-day blocks. So start with your daily budget from above, which is $25 a day in our example. Now consider a 3 day block, which is $75 worth of food. Instead of trying to spend the same amount of money every day, balance one expensive meal with two cheap ones.
Suppose you want to have steaks one night. You can balance those out with cheap pasta dishes the other two nights. Eating a nice meal every few nights is good for your budgeting moral, and will hopefully keep your cravings down for a meal at a restaurant, which is likely to be even more expensive than splurging at the grocery store.
3. Buy things on sale. This sounds obvious, but it’s not something we always do. You can buy some foods, like meat and cheese, while they’re on sale, freeze them, and then eat for weeks. So it makes sense to stock up on these things while they’re cheap and use them throughout the month.
Anything that is nonperishable or that can be frozen is ideal for buying in bulk when it’s on sale. Canned goods, pasta, meat, and cereal are just a few ideas.
Also be on the lookout for in-season fruits and vegetables. Not only are they fresher and better tasting, they tend to go on sale more often than out-of-season goods that have been shipped from other countries.
4. Stop eating out and learn to cook at home. For some this is going to be a difficult choice to make, but also one of the biggest ways to save money every week. Go back to your per-meal budget that you figured out in step 1. More than likely eating out, even at a fast food restaurant, will quickly break that limit.
Learning how to cook well is definitely an investment that will pay off over your lifetime, especially if you have kids to feed. It’s worth buying a few key cooking tools and books to get yourself started. They will last forever, and will make the process much easier and more enjoyable. I also recommend sites like Recipezaar and epicurious for finding free recipes when you want to try something new.
Even if you decide to throw together a nice meal it will often be significantly cheaper then it’s restaurant counterpart.
Those are the big things I can think of. If anyone has tips they follow at home I would love to hear them. Feel free to leave a comment, or send me an email and maybe I will create a follow-up to this post.
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