I love a new month to have a fresh start! Our grocery budget has been creeping up lately and I’m determined to stop it!
I know I’m not the only one who feels like their grocery spending has gotten out of control. The difference is that I know better! I am a grocery savings expert with an online course all about how to save money on groceries. I just need to do better at following my own advice.
In my defense, with six busy kids (some of whom I homeschool part- or full-time, some who are very involved in high school sports), a refugee family that we sponsor (I babysit the 3-year-old, and chauffer the 12-year-old around like one of my own), and my own involvement in many different things, I am spread pretty thin sometimes.
Being busy either leads me to be very organized or totally floundering. Often I am organized, but lately I have let the crazy overcome my organization efforts.
I know that even with prices soaring, I can get our family’s grocery budget back down to what I think is reasonable for us.
Here are the 4 big things I’m going to do in March to bring our grocery spending back down:
1. Meal Plan
Meal planning alone will bring my grocery spending down tremendously! With my busy-ness and overwhelm, I haven’t pushed myself to meal plan, so dinners have often been thrown together or fend-for-yourself style. That is always more expensive (and way less interesting) than well-planned meals.
I will plan out four weeks of meals, but not assign the meals to days. I like the flexibility of deciding what I will make each day based on my schedule and mood, but the convenience of knowing that I have everything I need to make any of those meals on any given day.
2. Organized Monthly Grocery Shopping Trip
I am a big advocate of an organized monthly (or twice-monthly) grocery shopping trip. When we go to the store every week or multiple times a week, we always spend more and we don’t end up using most of what’s in the pantry or the freezer (I’ll talk about the freezer in just a second).
In order to have an organized monthly grocery shopping trip, I need to plan our meals out first! Then using my customizable digital/printable shopping list (available in my online shop), I highlight all of the items I need to get. I use one color for Winco and one color for Sam’s Club. For most items, I already know what store is the better deal. Plus, if I go to Winco first, I can easily look at the Sam’s Club app to compare prices while I’m in Winco.
3. Use up what’s in the freezer
I haven’t dug deep into my chest freezers in a while. I know there are random ingredients in there that will give me some inspiration for meal planning. I want to base our meals on things we already have and need to use.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I made a video of going through our chest freezer as I took inventory of our pantry and food storage. I’m considering doing another video, but it might be too embarrassing to show our seriously disorganized freezers. Somehow I wasn’t to embarrassed last time though! Here is that video:
Another reason to use up what’s in the freezer is so that I can start making freezer meals again! It is so, so wonderful to take a day or two and fill the freezer with homemade freezer meals. Last time, I had to stop short of my goal because I ran out of freezer space. My life goes so much more smoothly (and my family eats more exciting meals) when I have freezer meals on hand.
4. Make Bread
Making our own bread isn’t just about saving money (though at nearly $3 a loaf for the store-bought bread, it definitely saves money). Everyone LOVES homemade bread around here.
Back when we were paying of six figures of student loan debt, we would make our own bread instead of buying sandwich bread from the store. I even calculated the saving back then.
We haven’t regularly made all of our sandwich bread in ages. We still make our favorite Soft French Bread often to go with dinner, but I haven’t baked sandwich bread in forever.
If making bread isn’t your thing, don’t worry, there are plenty of other ways to save money. Don’t think you can’t seriously reduce your grocery spending if you can’t make your own bread.
For March, I (or one of my kids) will make all of our sandwich bread. This is no small task since our family of 8 eats LOTS of sandwiches!
Who’s with me?
Who else is interested in lowering their grocery spending in March? Let’s do this together! Share in the comments what you are going to do to make it happen!
If you want lots of help and direction to make serious changes in your grocery spending every single month, check out my course Grocery Budget Hero. Right now it’s available with pay-what-you-can pricing, so that it’s accessible to everyone!
Spending money on groceries for your family is an expense that comes up every single month, so learning how to really reduce what you spend on groceries pays off month after month!
Thank you for sharing and I loved your grocery class! Last month was so successful, I’m going to do it again this month. We are a family of 5 outside of Sacramento and used Winco and Sam’s club. We didn’t eat out once and we did 445 last month! Lately it’s been closer to 800. I dedicated myself to cooking this time..a lot! And it paid off. used my wheat grinder and made whole wheat sandwich bread. I used the same dough to boil bagels and it was such a success! We froze them for lunches. We did muffin Monday for breakfast and waffle Wed. Oatmeal on other days. We also made Crockpot yogurt made from powdered milk. We top with homemade jam and with homemade granola. I tripled and froze the muffins and waffles so I only had to do it once for the month. I made a big batch of hamburger buns to freeze. You can do turkey burgers, bean burgers, tuna melts, lentil joes, homemade BBQ sauce with shredded chicken etc. We made lots of casseroles (we love your creamy tacos casserole!). One helpful thing was buying only a dozen eggs and then writing on them to decide what they are for. Two said waffles, one said cornbread etc so people wouldn’t eat them. We are hoping egg prices will go down again! We used to do a lot with eggs. At the end of the month when fresh fruit was gone we did smoothies. We made oatmeal protein poppers for snacks with canned fruit or cut veggies. We made from scratch ranch, Italian, BBQ sauce, and maple syrup. We cooked a turkey from last years sale. We make our own cream soup mix from powdered milk, bouillon and corn starch. That’s the base for Alfredo, tuna casserole, broccoli chicken casserole, swedish pancakes, turkey and gravy on potatoes and more. Otherwise we do fish, veg, rice a lot. Or chicken, veg, potatoes. Other ideas are homemade pizza, chili and cornbread, soup and stew, grilled cheese and tomato soup, ground beef and cabbage pockets or pizza pockets. If I get desperate I’ll do maseca corn tortillas, lol. We bought the big Sam’s club mozzarella cheese and the big Mexican mix and used them for everything. Hope this helps someone! WE CAN DO THIS!
Way to go Katie! Going from nearly $800/month to $445/month is huge grocery savings! I’m so happy for you!! I love all of your ideas and I know they will definitely help lots of people! So smart and organized!! I’ve never had “lentil joes” but my family is used to lentil tacos, so I’m totally going to give lentil joes a try! And marking your eggs so they don’t get used for the wrong thing is genius. I’m ready for egg prices to go back down too! We normally use eggs a lot too, but in the winter our hens don’t lay much. Keep up the great work Katie!!
I am trying to use up the food from my freezers this month due to an unexpected tax bill. We have a drawer freezer in our fridge and an upright chest freezer of equal size in the basement. I like to alternate between the freezers: one for “using up” and the other for “stocking up.” This system would work better if, when it’s the basement freezer’s turn to be the “using up” freezer, I could remember to pull something out for the next day’s meal when I return from work, before going upstairs. Once I am upstairs, it’s too easy to just pull something from the fridge’s freezer instead. (Oh, those tiny habits…)
I LOVE this idea of organizing your freezers like this and alternating between them! We have two chest freezers in our garage and both are just a mix of everything. When I shop I just put things wherever they’ll fit, which is why it’s so disorganized and the things way down in the depths often get overlooked. I’m going to figure out how a system like this would work for us. Thanks for sharing!