Grocery Shopping Planning

Now that I am a stay at home mom, money has to be dealt with completely different.  My husband is salary where he works and only gets paid once a month.  So, that is our money for the whole month.  So, now .. grocery shopping takes a lot more planning.  Instead of buying for a week or two, we are buying groceries for the entire month.

April was the first month we did this.  I printed out an April calendar and started writing on each day what we would be eating.  I didn't care if we stuck to it specifically on the exact days, but it gave me an idea of what we were going to be eating.  Then, I made a list of what we needed to buy at the grocery store for every meal.  We went to Walmart for the majority of our shopping.  We also made a trip to Meijer to get a few things they had on sale.  I know Walmart price matches, but certain sales, they do not.  The sales we wanted, they do not price match.  Between the two trips, we spent $250.  In our trip to Meijer though, we ended up buying diapers (Meijer brand that was on clearance) and a baby monitor (also on clearance).  So, that wasn't strictly groceries. Now, we had a few items that we didn't buy and a few items that I missed getting on the list.  Overall though, we have maybe spent an extra $25 on things we didn't get in those 2 trips.  I'm very happy with $250-$275 for a month's worth of groceries though for our family of 5!

Making a list of meals and supplies has helped us lower our grocery bill a ton.  We are not buying things that we don't end up using.  We made sure to check for sales on the items we needed and got the sale price by matching at Walmart.

Now, that I am starting to use coupons more though, I will probably not be shopping quite as often at Walmart.  They accept the coupons, sure, but other stores double them.  Walmart does not.  Too bad since Walmart is so close to my house though!!  I probably should figure gas prices in to see if it is really worth driving somewhere else to shop lol.