Grocery Update

I haven't posted about grocery costs in a while and one of the blogs I read regularly just had topic about doing a grocery audit, so it reminded me that I really needed to go over things again and see where we stood. To remind you, we have been attempting $300 per month on food and $100 on household items like tp, pet food, cleaning supplies, etc - $400 total. After a few months, we seem to be gravitating towards a natural spending amount of between $500-550 for food and household costs. This being said, some months, we are able to get around our goal amount.

I honestly don't know why we can make our goal amount some months and other months go $100+ over. Maybe it depends on how much I'm using coupons in a particular month (I'm not a big coupon user but will use one if I was going to buy that item anyway). Maybe some months we are able to cruise by on our pantry stockpile. I just have no idea.

This month, I'm attempting to do more freezer cooking, which I've been told will cut down on food costs big time once you get the hang of it. So far, I've spent half of our grocery budget for the month and have stocked up on bulk items at Costco. Once I get some more freezer cooking done and have outlined more meal plans for the month, I am hoping that it will enable me to successfully say that I was able to meet our food budget at the end of the month.

We have discussed raising our grocery budget by $50 to see if that gives us a little more wiggle room so we aren't stressing out about how much we've spent and aren't squeaking by on plain white rice and carrots for the last few meals of the month. But before we do that, I want to attempt a heavier freezer cooking rotation to see what difference, if any, it makes. I look forward to giving an update!