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I know that I am a little late posting this but I ended up getting sick at the end of the month and it took me a little while to get back in fighting shape. However, it did make me happy that we did so well on our grocery budget last month. I don’t usually post about our grocery budget but I’m going to try to do a monthly review every month this year in 2013.

Our goal for January was our usual grocery budget of $200. We put our receipts in a reused junk mail envelope so that we can total them up periodically to check our progress. This budget is for two adults and yes we do eat three meals a day at home. We only ate out 2-3 times the entire month. I mention that not because we include what we spent eating out in the grocery budget but to show that we really do eat almost all of our meals at home. This also includes all household items such as toilet paper, soap, toothpaste, etc. Here is the breakdown-

January Monthly Grocery and Household Item Budget- $200

Number of People in Our Household- 2

Number of Meals a Month- 85-90

People I know who don’t coupon think that this is an extremely low number. People who do coupon tend to think that this is a high number. I like to think that it is in the middle.

Why $200 a month?

Things that make our costs a little higher-

– We try to eat healthy with as little junk food as possible- This means more fresh vegetables and fruits that aren’t that cheap in where we live. Also healthy foods have fewer coupons than junk food.

– We really do eat at home all the time- This means our grocery budget is a little higher but our eating out budget is a lot lower.

– This budget isn’t just food- It’s also all household items we may need like soap.

Things that help keep our food costs low-

– Couponing, couponing, couponing- While there are less coupons for healthy food that doesn’t mean they aren’t out there, it just takes a little more work

– Shopping Loss Leader Sales- Buying items at the lowest possible prices

– Shopping at Aldi a Discount Grocery Store- Food staples are simply lower at Aldi. Although Aldi doesn’t take coupons, most of the items we buy there aren’t items that usually have coupons anyways like flour and sugar.

– Shopping at Dollar Tree- Everything is $1. We can get regular sized laundry detergent for $1 and it works the same as name brand. We buy things there that are just plain cheaper than anywhere else even accounting for size and quality

– Use it Up, Wear it Out, Make it Do or Do Without- We try not to waste food and we also try to make our meals around the items that we get deals.

– Stockpiling household items- We buy them at the lowest possible price to save $ in the long run

So how did we do this month?

We Spent- $192.33

We Saved $ 197.52 (this doesn’t even count stores like dollar tree that don’t show what you save over other stores)

So we actually came in under budget which is always good. Also, $20 of what we spent was on the last day of January on groceries that we were generally buying for next month, but as I said I was sick and didn’t think I would make it back to the store for a while and I didn’t.

Tune in at the end of Febuary to see how we do with our $200 grocery budget for next month.