Wednesday 24 April 2013

First Ever Budget-Bust



Well, we’ve managed it already. We blew our budget. 

Intent on making sure the money situation was under control, I was sitting on one of the bar stools in the kitchen a few days ago, adding up the food receipts that were beginning to amass on the fridge. I noticed two things:
  1. We go grocery shopping far too much. There were two instances in which we had gone to the store three days in a row. Didn’t my mother teach me any better?
  2. The receipts spanned over three weeks and totaled $437.20.
I entered the totals into my phone-calculator the first time, stared, and then entered them in a second time to be sure. A single query rattled into my brain: how the hell did two people manage to buy nearly $450 worth of food just 21 days? 

I got up and grabbed a highlighter, a pencil and a notebook. At the end of my receipt-scouring frenzy, I found out that, by barely changing our diets at all, we could have saved $130. 

Amongst the  highlighted "did we really need this?" items, I spied a copy of Skyfall, a couple of Wunderbars, a few bags of tortilla chips and some jars of salsa to accompany them, a 2-litre tub of ice cream and some surprisingly expensive bulk dried mangoes.

Needless to say, those items will be missing from our next grocery bills.




What’s your grocery budget? What are some tricks that you use to stick to it?

4 comments:

  1. Meal plan! Make a meal plan for the month then compile the grocery list, buying all the non-perishables in one trip. Stock up on fresh fruit and veg each week.
    Do not buy anything else.

    ... but then I'm a controlling sort of household administrator. Good luck!

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    1. Meal plan. Love it. After all, sometimes you need a controlling household administrator to keep the budgets in check, right?

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  2. Garden! The cheapest produce is the produce you pick.

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    1. Very, very true. The tom cat and I are planning on doing just that, too.

      My green thumb, however, is more brown and shriveled than anything, so cross your fingers for me and hope that I won't just kill everything I plant!

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