How to Spend $50 dollars a week on groceries from Lickety Letters

Posted by Geoff on November 5, 2011 · 2 Comments 

Is that budget for one person because you can’t feed my Family on that little.

 

Actually the truth is that I have a family of four and we are able to make $50 dollars a week work. However my kids are 1 and 2 so it might be different if you your kids are 14 and 16 year old boys and they are literally eating you out of house and home. That being said, I still have some really great tips for you to significantly  reduce your food budget and still eat good meals.

Tip # 1

Plan your dinners in advance of going to the grocery store! My wife and I used to just go to the store for dinner for that night or we would just decided randomly that we really need to go buy groceries. When we used to plan our budget we would plan a minimum of $400 dollars a month just for food. I was talking to someone recently who had not looked at there budget in a while and when he added up all the grocery store purchases they made from the prior month it came to  $1,000 dollars. Thats two or three car payments! or what i used to pay to rent my 1 bedroom apartment. So please! Plan your meals out before you go to the store.

 

Tip # 2

Buy good quality food that is going to fill you up. Do not waste your time planning out these great meals just to sabotage your budget with unfulfilling snacks like chips, and soda and crackers.* We are trying to get the biggest bang for your buck so put your cold hard cash towards foods that are naturally  higher in fiber such as fruits and vegetables. (Plus since you are breaking your grocery shopping down into week increments, you can afford to buy all those fruits and vegatables that if you only went to the grocery store once a month  would go bad on day 9 or sooner.)

 

Tip #3

Try to plan meals that are big enough to eat at least twice in that week. The more you can stretch your meals the easier it will be to stay under $50 dollars a week. Think casserole or something similar. One week my wife had a teriffic idea to jazz up green bean casserole and eat that for two or three meals that week. Ground sausage can do wonders for green bean casserole! MMMMHHMM!!

 

Tip #4

This tip might be a hard one for some of you out there BUT do not plan on eating meat with every meal, every night that week. It will take some creativity but it is possible to eat a great meal and not have meat as the main food on your plate. Go for a big salad with a plethora of vegatables, not only will you feel full but your waist line will thankyou. Meat can be expensive so not buying 6 nights worth of meat can really lower your weekly food budget.

 

Tip#5

Make it a game! Look the truth is that grocery shopping is not that fun all the time. Somedays we are probably going to have to spend a little more and other days we won’t believe how little we spent! Turning it into a game is a good way to keep things lite and fun. My wife has an uncanny ability to remember the price of every item we pick up and then keep a running total of it so at the the end when I make a completely random guess she surprises me by only being off by a dollar or two.

 

So that is how you spend $50 dollars a week on groceries. Some of you are saying to yourself right now but the dunce only talked about dinner. That is true, my total monthly budget for groceries is $250 dollars. We buy some items like diapers and formula with our grocery budget and when we see deals or sales for items that we can freeze we take from that extra $ 50 dollars.

Start planning out those meals and see if you can’t spend significantly less on your next grocery shopping trip.

Filed under Family, Finance, Food · Tagged with Budget, Eating, Family (House), Food, Grocery store, Home, Meal, Meat