As most of you know, our main financial problem is that we spend too much money on food. When I first started blogging back in 2011, we were spending over $1,000 on food each month JUST for the two of us.
It's a number I still don't even understand and I feel ashamed whenever I mention it. We have been doing better over the years, but nothing to be proud of.
Some of our problems related to food include:
- We go to restaurants too many times each week.
- Too much of our food is wasted and has to be thrown away.
- We get lazy and tend to make the same meals over and over again.
That's why one of our main goals for 2015 is to make more delicious meals at home.
We would like our average food budget for 2 each month to be somewhere around $500 per month. We want this monthly average food budget to include going out to eat and grocery spending, and I believe this is a number we should easily be able to achieve.
Since this is just a food budget for 2, $500 a month should be a reasonable number! I know there are many people out there who spend just a few hundred dollars each month for their growing families, and that is just amazing.
Below are the different actions we plan on taking in order to finally cut our food spending each month and have a lower food budget for 2 people:
More of our meals will be prepped ahead of time.
At one point, we were doing well with prepping our meals ahead of time. We would cook our chicken, vegetables, and a few other items a few days ahead so that we could eat a healthy meal easily.
Then, we fell off the wagon…
I am going to start doing this again. I would like to prep around four or five easy meals at a time so that we can have quick meals and snacks. This way we will be less likely to go out to eat because we will have something at home already cooked.
I will create a better meal plan to fit our monthly food budget.
Sometimes I'm great when it comes to meal planning, but other times I am quite bad. My plan to overcome this problem is that I will just pay to have meal plans sent directly to me. I never understood this before, so I always skipped meal planning subscriptions. However, at $5 a month with a lot of the legwork already completed, it is a GREAT idea.
The meal planning subscription I recently joined is $5 Meal Plans. I am an affiliate as well and will be doing a full review once I get a better feel of it.
So far I can already tell that it's a great program. It's only $5 a month (the first four weeks are free too) and you get meal plans sent straight to you along with the exact shopping list you need in order to create the meals. Each meal costs around $2 per person or less. This allows you to save time because you won't have to meal plan anymore, and it will save you money as well! If you are interested in joining for free, click here.
We will buy less processed food.
I am guilty of trying to save time by buying pre-made or easy-to-cook meals. This includes frozen appetizers, packaged meals, and more. These are expensive and super unhealthy.
My plan is to cook more meals from scratch so that I can stop spending money on processed food. This leads to the next action we plan on taking…
I will stop being lazy so that we can have a more realistic average food budget for 2.
Sometimes I find a great recipe on Pinterest, only to read the recipe and find that there are 20 steps. This then throws my whole meal plan off because I get lazy and decide to not make the meal anymore.
My plan is to stop being lazy. I need to stop being intimidated by recipes that have more than just a few steps. Am I the only one who gets scared by long recipes? 🙂
I will keep track of our food spending.
I would like to start keeping track of the exact amount of money we spend on food and post it here on Making Sense of Cents each month.
I feel that doing this will make me actually pay attention to my goal since I will have to share how good or how horrible I did each month. This will make me pay attention to our average food budget more closely.
Also, it will feel more like a contest with myself and hopefully I can improve each and every month by publishing the exact amount of money we are spending on food.
What is your average food budget each month? Are you trying to lower it?
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I take out cash for groceries for each pay period. When that money is gone, no more purchasing food! LOL. We’ve saved a lot of money this way.
I LOVE this! We are a family of 5 (2 adults, a 6 yr. old, 3 yr. old and 1 yr. old) and we have a $200/mo. grocery budget (includes toiletries and household things too). It takes a bit of work, but it can be done! Part of what helps us do so well is the fact that we use coupons and also I stockpile some. For instance, if I see that I can get a 12 pk. of toilet paper for $5 by combining a coupon and sale, I’ll go ahead and buy at least 2. This will get us through till the next sale and will save us at least $8. By doing this regularly on all sorts of different items, I can save a ton!
I love your commitment to making more of your own food. I think you’ll be surprised at how much that will save you. Oh, and tracking your spending here on your blog will be a great motivator! At least it is for me. 🙂 I’m anxious to see how it goes for you- you can do this!
Now I’m going to go see if I can find your update on how the first month went. 🙂