Like most people, Austin and I have been trying to cut back on expenses, and save a little money. Our monthly cost of living is relatively low, considering that we live in a basement and do without a lot of luxuries. And luckily we have cars with good gas mileage, and we live within about a 3 mile radius of anywhere we need to go.
So we decided the best place to save more was in our grocery bill. I feel like it's much harder to cook for just two people, cause I find myself throwing out a lot of leftovers and produce that goes bad before I can use it. So I did some research, and read tons of articles on how to avoid throwing money away.
The best advice I found was using the 80/20 rule. The idea is that 20% of the items on your grocery list will cost 80% of your budget, so by cutting out just a few things in that 20%, you'll save a ton. And it applied it to the actual kitchen--that 20% of the staples you already have (flour, eggs, milk, sugar, etc.) will be used in 80% of the meals you make. So there's no point in keeping a ton of excess around, when you already have 80% of what you need.
With that in mind, I sat down last night and planned out 14 healthy (and delicious) meals, meals that we already had the majority of the ingredients for in the house. I found that we have a lot more on hand than I ever would have thought. I also chose meals with similar ingredients, so that each item on my grocery list would be used in at least 2 or 3 meals (I found some things that I would use in 5 of them). Our list was much shorter than usual, and more efficient.
We ended up buying everything we needed for all 14 meals for just over $70.00. That works out to almost exactly $5.00 dollars a meal. And that's only $2.50 a person! And I tried to choose things that would be easy to take for lunch as leftovers, so who knows how long it will last. It all seems so simple, but it ended up cutting our grocery bill almost in half, and will likely avoid all that waste.
Sometimes it's just not so bad being poor.
5 comments:
What were some of those meals? I need ideas!!
I try to use the same indredients in different meals... for instance if I need an onion for monday's meal, I try and find another meal that also needs an onion for Wednesday's meal... flylady.net has helped a TON in doing this.
NICE!! I'm so proud of you.. I need to learn that...
Good luck keeping that up! (I'm the nay-sayer here) Also those savings will stay consistent until you burn through all of the staples you already had and have to go buy eggs and flour and whatnot. We go through good phases but Carl's Jr coupons are just as much of a deal as I've ever come across. :-)
haha Scott--I thought you were the master miser! My biggest challenge is cutting back on the cooking now that we have gone from 8 kids down to 4. I had to get rid of all the big pans.
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