August Grocery Budget

Since it's the beginning of August, I wanted to encourage all of you to sit down and make a grocery budget for the month. Some of you may already do this, but I am sure that a lot of people have no set grocery budget at all. How can you know if you are truly saving money, if you have no set budget that you've started from?

For the last several months we've had a set grocery budget of $60.00 a week for my family of five...this includes all food, toiletries, paper products, medicines. I really feel like I've been able to build a good stockpile of basic items, so I am challenging myself to try to spend $40.00 a week for this month. I've still budgeted $60.00 just in case I can't make it, but each week I'm going to take out only $40.00 and see if I can make it last the whole week. This is kind of tricky because with the stockpile of food that I've been able to build up, I'm sure that I could go several weeks only buying perishable items...but then by the end of the month my pantry would be bare and I'd be back to buying items at full price. My goal is to cut my weekly grocery budget down, but still manage to stockpile basic foods in my pantry. I'm not sure if I'll be able to do it, but thought that if I actually wrote that I'm going to be trying it that it will keep me more accountable. At the end of the week I'll let you know how I did for the first week of August.

I encourage you to set some goals for yourself. If you are just starting out, try to save $5.00 or $10.00 a week...might not seem like a lot, but it's a good place to start!!

Hope all of you are starting to see your spending go down and your savings go up!! Let me know how you guys are doing!! Would love some feedback from you.