Grocery Budget

James and I finally got on track again with using a budget to manage our finances.  We are on our 5th month now. We expected our mortgage to be the biggest expense each month, but we never would have guessed food would be the second biggest sucker of our money. We rarely eat out, we both get free lunch at work, the kids aren't home for lunch.....what gives?!?!?!

Neither of us are "foodies" and both understand that food is just fuel for our bodies, so we eat pretty light.  We rarely make meals for supper, and when we do, it's usually just one main item and then we hunt in the fridge for something to have with it. Also, James brings home leftover food from work quite often, and sometimes we eat on that for multiple days.  Yet, we still think our food expense is ridiculous every month!  We have found that we actually spend less than a lot of families do, but it still just seems outrageous.  Sure, food is a necessity, just like shelter, which we have no problems paying for...but ugh, we just hate spending money on food.

This past summer we started shopping at Aldi. It's possibly our favorite grocery store now.  Actually, no, I still like Hy-Vee best....but the amount of items I get at Aldi for the same amount of money at Hy-vee is almost double.

I'll admit, I totally judged Aldi.  My whole life, I thought Aldi was a dirty store for poor people (because poor people must be dirty??). You weren't going to catch me in that store, no way!  But then I slowly started hearing people talk about Aldi more and more over the past 3 years. When James' co-worker talked to him about Aldi and gave James some of his food to try, he came home and told me we needed to check it out. I still wasn't so sure.  So, naturally, I sent James in first......

James was doing some cost comparison of Fareway, Hy-Vee, Walmart and Target anyway, so he was more than happy to add another store to his rounds. After his visit, it appeared that all the gossip was true....Aldi IS CHEAP!!  So, I decided to go check it out for myself.  I went inside with no plans to buy anything, just wanted to take a look.  I was very surprised at how nice the store was and I found a lot of their labels to be even "prettier" than the other stores. Okay, I'll give it a shot!

So, we tried just a few things the first couple of times we shopped at Aldi. We loved everything we bought, some even more than the other stores (chicken nuggets!!).  Their $5 take and bake pizza is one of our favs...it's bigger than other stores and so good!  To save a dollar, we buy the cheese pizza (because the rest are $6), and use whatever we have at home for toppings.  Yes, we are THAT ridiculous!

Anyway, we are now fans of Aldi and cannot wait for the new store in Ames to be finished!!  If you haven't been or are still a skeptic....try it out!!  Just don't forget to bring your own sacks and a quarter to use a cart (you will get your quarter back - these are ways the company saves money so they can sell items for less).

One thing we do not do to save money is use coupons. Pretty much the sole reason for this is that most of the items we buy never have a coupon.  We tend to stick to produce, meat, dairy and a few freezer items (you know, all the expense stuff in the store), non of which seem to have coupons. We also usually favor the most expensive item of a kind, like yogurt...the one with the most protein and least amount of sugar is always the most expensive!

The past 5 months since tracking our expenses, we have spent approximately $575 each month on groceries. We budget for less than that and always go over (so what good is our budget, right?!?!). We are hoping that this was just a summer time thing and we won't spend as much during the winter.

To track our spending, we have been using Google Drive. One nice thing about this, is that we can enter our expenditures as they happen. We both have the app on our phone and just enter any money we spend immediately after spending it.

Tell me, what do you do to save money on food???  Specifically, how do you save on snacks for the kids?  I feel like half of my grocery bill is kids' snacks.....which we could really limit if we tried harder. I also tend to splurge on some things.....like pumpkin pie ice cream for $5 (when all the other flavors are $2)...but hey, it's seasonal and it won't be there the next time I go! I do try to go to the store just once a week, but when something unexpected comes up, or we feel like having something that wasn't on the menu for the week, I will occasionally go multiple times in a week. Plus, if I shopped at Aldi, I still have to go to another store to get the items they didn't have. I try to stick to my list (and I always write my list in order of the aisles so I don't have to go back and forth), but almost every time I buy something that was not on the list.  I think grocery shopping is just always going to be a necessary evil.