I noticed that there have been a couple of queries for that recently, so I thought I might try to share some ideas. I’ve had to spend only $20 a week (for just me) on groceries several times in my life – by which I guess I mean that there have been several times when I decided most of my money should be going someplace other than food. I’ll post soon and share about making spending plans that work for you and fund your meals luxuriously… but first, how I pinch pennies!
- I pay attention to how much things cost. I don’t mean in a nagging way – “you need to pay attention to how much things cost! Money doesn’t grow on trees, you know!” I mean that I have a good sense of what different items cost at different grocery stores, and that I can think of several meals I enjoyed that were surprisingly cheap. When I plan out my meals for the week, I guesstimate how much each ingredient I need will cost, so that I can add it up and adjust to stay within budget. You can do this too; our free meal planner guides you through it.
- I pick all cheap meals, instead of tossing in a fancier meal or two like I ususally do. I know, this sounds too obvious. “Oh, you mean I just need to buy cheap food? Gee, thanks.” I think the real key here is that I plan my meals in the first place. I’ve tried going to the grocery store without even a list, just figuring that I need to pick out something cheap – I end up wandering the aisles, madly adding things up in my head, never satisfied, for hours. But if I sit down in advance and say, “Okay… something with rice would probably be cheap… oh, I could try a curry, but that might have too many ingredients to be cheap… Trader Joe’s has cheap free-range chicken, I could make that stew again and even use rice to turn it into more servings, how much would that be? I’d want tomatoes, and a tray of chicken, that’s about $4 so far, and I could probably get rice for like seventy-five cents if I got it in bulk at Berkeley Bowl even if it was organic, and then I just need to throw in some garlic and spices that I already have, and that’s about $4.75 for probably eight meals already!”
- I hit the cupboard. I think most of us have food on hand that we don’t even take into account. There’s the half-bag of pasta whose other half went into soup, the forgotten peanut butter, the fancy jar of cookie mix that was a gift, the beans that seemed less appealing once we got out of the store, the canned tomatoes that we forgot to throw into the stew…. I’ve seen several foodbloggers set themselves a challenge of eating solely what was on hand until it was all gone, and some of them didn’t have to grocery shop at all for weeks!
Each of these is a great way to save money on groceries, whether longer-term or just for a week. Of course, I don’t recommend drastically slashing the food budget on a regular basis. Feeling deprived, for many people, is the surest path to binge-spending later. But in a pinch, or to save up for something wonderful, it can be a great adventure.
