If your family is anything like mine, it’s easy to lose track of how much money you spend on food. While most of us don’t spend grossly excessive amounts of money on eating out or other culinary delights, the cost of food is one of the most easily overlooked costs when creating a budget. The following are 5 tips to successfully tracking and reducing the amount you and/or your family spends on food:
1. When you creating a budget, list money spent at the grocery store and money spent eating out under the same category.
It’s tempting to make separate categories for money spent at restaurants and money spent at the grocery store. When you put together a budget, the goal is to track the total amount spent on any one type of thing. Unless your work requires you to spend a certain amount on eating at a restaurant with clients, any meal you eat is a meal that you could have brought from home. Once you have an idea of the total amount you spend on food, you can more easily devote a certain amount of money to groceries and a certain amount to eating out.
2. Break your grocery bill down by category and track how much you spend on non-essentials, i.e. snack foods, alcohol, etc.
When I first started doing this, I was surprised by the amount we were spending on drinks. Now that I’m aware of this trend, we save roughly $20 a week on our grocery bill. Though that might not seem like much, $20 adds up over the weeks. Do this a few weeks in a row, and you’ll have a better handle on whether your spending is balanced.
3. Grow your own: if you enjoy gourmet-style cooking, invest in an herb garden. If you have the room and the time, plant a vegetable garden.
If you’re a vegan or just love to cook with fresh herbs, you quickly come to realize just how expensive that proposition can become. Personally, I’m too much of a food snob to cook without flavor. Spending $30 on a windowsill herb garden has saved me over $50 in the past six months alone.
Fresh vegetables —depending on the source and the season— can be more expensive than meat. If you have the space, time and motivation; plant a vegetable garden. Make spaghetti sauce, applesauce, etc. in bulk and take up canning. Not only can this save money, but it’s also a fun project.
4. If everyone in the house works outside the home, consider cooking in bulk and freezing meals for later use.
The most common reason we go out to eat is because we simply don’t have enough energy at the end of the day to cook a full meal. Cooking ahead of time can solve that problem. Designate one weekend a month as a “cooking weekend”. Clip coupons the week before and look out for sales on different food items. Plan your recipes around what’s available on sale. Go to the store on Saturday and buy all of your ingredients. On Sunday, spend the day assembling your freezer meals.
If you don’t know how to make meals ahead, check out some of the great books available on the subject. 30 Day Gourmet is a website that provides 30 days of freeze-ahead meal ideas.
5. Realize that ‘special treats’ are sometimes necessary to avoid splurging.
One of the best ways to remain frugal is to be realistic. Your goal should be to cut down on the amount of times you go out to eat and on your total grocery bill. That doesn’t mean you should eliminate all excess expenditures from your life. Plan on going out a certain pre-determined number of times a month. Plan on how much you’ll spend at each outing and stick to it. If you don’t take this necessary step, you’re unlikely to stay with the other steps you’ve taken toward reducing your food-related expenses.
Bio: Alexis Bonari is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a blogger and in her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.
5 Frugal Tips for Reducing Your Weekly Food Expense,
Great tips! I find that cooking ahead of time and freezing smaller portions is a great way to always have lunches on hand as well.
Saving on food is always a good idea. One thing to do is look for sales with bonus loyalty points (which can be used to get further discounts or free groceries).
Also, I record prices at different stores in my iPhone as I can’t always remember if a certain $/kg is a good deal =)
Great ideas,
Also combining coupons with weekly sales is where to really save. Buy what is in season as well.
Some good tips there. I gotta say though, in our experience, planting a vegetable garden is by no way a money-saver. Even before you factor in the long hours of work.
These are some great tips on saving on your food spending! I’m glad that you added tip #5. It is especially difficult to stick to a budget when you eliminate all the little things that can make life easier or a little happier. If going out a lot to eat is putting a big dent in your wallet, you should focus on trying to limit the number of times you go out per week instead of cutting it out completely. I have been trying to do this, and have started cooking more home cooked meals which I can save in the fridge and reheat as leftovers. It is working out so far!
After dinner we immediately pack up the leftovers into our lunch containers so there’s no excuse for not grabbing a premade lunch the next morning. If there aren’t enough veggies left, just add some frozen peas or corn.
We purposely over cook at least one part of every meal so that we have the basis of the next meal. When we cook pasta we intentionally make extra so we can have pasta salad or a casserole a day or two later. When we cook up ground beef for the spaghetti sauce one night we do extra to make tacos or chili later in the week. Not only do you save time by not repeating the identical step for another meal, you save on electricity. We often cook an large amount of chicken at once so we’ll have leftovers for fajitas, chicken salad, tetrazini etc. I meal from scratch is much faster if you have some precooked ingredients to work with. When doing up the week’s meal plan I intentionally plan meals in sequence to use the leftovers purposely created on previous days.
Creating a meal plan for the week also saves a ton at the store. You know what you already have in the freezer and pantry and only put the missing items on the list. No grabbing things just in case or trying to remember what you already have.
Great tips!
I just bought a basil plant (too non-green thumbed to plant them from seeds) and it cost me about the same price as a few leaves of basil I would usually buy at the grocery store. =)
Hope to expand my herb garden soon!
We make at least 2 or three dinners on Sunday, then just pop them in the freezer, then take them out the morning we are going to eat them. We always save one premade meal for Friday, because we find that day is the most tempting to go out. Everyone is tired from the weeks activities.
We always cook eough dinner to make healthy lunches for the next day at work that are easy to pack and go. On friday after woork we always pick up fresh veggies and meats and build a sub or make your own pizza, which is a hit with the whole family!