While I don’t get requests for posts often,
sometimes I do get so many questions about one certain topic that I know I need
to address it some way. Most recently I’ve received questions about how I cook on
a budget, plan my meals, and with small children underfoot.
So this Mama Monday post is all about Feeding the
Family: The Budget.
Before you ever set foot in your local grocery
store, you better have a budget. You need to know how much you can spend each
week to make it through the month. Since we live on one salary, I have to make
sure that we can make it through a month without eating beans and rice for a
week.
Each month I spend around $600-$700 on groceries
for our family of 5. This money is only for food and doesn’t include gas or
non-food household items. This averages out to about $150 a week. I try to
always have this amount of money IN CASH when I go grocery shopping. I
emphasized the phrase “in cash” because if I just swipe my debit or credit card
it’s a lot easier for me to go over budget. The weeks that I don’t stop by the
ATM to get cash, I almost always overspend which is not a good thing.
I want to tell you right now that:
- I do not clip coupons (too much time involved)
- I do not shop at huge warehouse stores like Sam’s
Club or Costco (we don’t have enough storage in our house for 50 rolls of paper
towel no matter how cheap they are!)
- I do not drive from store to store to nab the best
deals out of each store’s weekly flyer (I am usually shopping with all three
kids and getting them in and out of three or more stores without a fight,
someone crying, or being nagged to death for candy is never going to happen).
Here is how I try to maximize my budget:
Buy
meat only when it’s on sale. Meat is the most expensive part
of any meal 99% of the time. I would love to tell you that I cook vegetarian
meals once or twice a week, but I don’t because Preacher Man would probably cry
if there wasn’t some kind of meat on the table. It’s too depressing to see a
grown man cry, so meat shows up at every meal. Our local grocery store puts new
selections of meat on sale every Wednesday, so I try to sneak up there after
the kids are in bed to look it over. I buy two packages of everything I know we
will eat and store them in the deep freeze in the garage. Some weeks this
equals two packages of chicken, pork chops, roast, and steak. Some weeks it’s
only a couple of different cuts of meat, but I always buy two. I usually do
this the first and third week of the month. That way the second and fourth
weeks I don’t need to buy meat (or not as much) and can use the extra money in
my budget to load up on more of my household needs like cleaning supplies, laundry
detergent, diapers, etc.
Keep
away from pre-packaged food as much as possible.
Not only is this stuff not as healthy for you (just read the list of
ingredients, you probably can’t pronounce half of it!), but it’s more
expensive. I’ll be honest, we do eat some of this stuff, but I do try to limit
it. It’s just not worth it when you can make it much cheaper and much healthier.
I also don’t buy snack foods (cookies, crackers, chips) are not happening
around here.
Have
a menu ready and ONLY buy what you need for that menu or to restock your
staples (flour, milk, eggs, bread, etc.). I will talk
specifically about how I menu plan next week, but the worst thing you can do is
walk into a grocery store without a list of what you need to cook meals at your
house. Why? Because you will walk up and down the aisles and say, “That looks
good. I’ll get that,” and at checkout discover you have succeeded at going well
over budget.
Figure
out your items that are non-negotiable and cut out something else to make it
happen. I try, try, try to feed my family food that is
healthy, organic, and not processed. However, I am on a budget and buying all
organic is just not feasible right now. I use the dirty dozen list as my base,
but no matter what I try I cannot afford organic meat. It’s just too much, but
I am able to buy the rest of the items on the dirty dozen list. However, to be
able to do this I decided that this was important to me for my family, so I cut
back in some areas to be able to buy organic. I only mention this because
trying to buy organic or gluten-free can be expensive. If it matters to you and
your family, then cut things out of the budget. You can do it.
One last tip….
If you are getting started on trying to cook more from
home, start small. Only cook a couple of nights a week, and then add some more
nights the next month. One thing I can promise you is that cooking at home is
much, much cheaper than eating out. When our family eats at a restaurant it
will cost us about $45-$50 including the tip. I can feed our family steak
(bought on sale), baked potatoes, steamed broccoli with cheese sauce, salad,
and homemade bread for about $20 with the steak being half of the cost. Or take
fast food as an example, for our family $25. If I make burgers and fries (not
frozen, homemade), the total cost is around $8. I know the time factor comes
into play here, but we’ll deal with that problem in a couple of weeks.
So work up a budget and get excited about feeding
your family!
Go to Part 2:The Menu
Seeing just how cheap I can feed these folks in
the tree house,
Chelli