Grocery Budgeting
As a parent or caretaker, one constant question is – what will my child eat today? This question could be a serious source of stress or it could be one of routine. There are many stressful factors that go into feeding your child every day, some of them include: financial situations, time availability, overall health, work schedules, food allergies and intolerance, and picky eaters.
I find myself stressing over the food we purchase at the grocery store, the time to actually do meal prep for the food we buy, and then hoping that my child will eat the food that we’ve prepared. It is a constant, daily point of stress for me. I find myself getting stressed around mealtime because I don’t really know how it is going to go. Will my son eat what I put in front of him for breakfast? Or will he eat two bites and then claim he is done? Or will he see what I am eating, which is the exact same thing that he is eating, and want to eat my food but none of his food? Which, in that scenario is a dream come true because he will actually eat.
My husband and I spend a lot of time focusing on food for our family. We have a set grocery order that we try to stick with and we rotate through many different food options throughout the week. For a full list of what our family eats, check out my Resources page. We also try to stick within a certain budget for groceries and eating out each week. This can be difficult to do when our son goes on a food strike and we literally run out of options to give him. It can also be difficult when we are really tired from the week and just want to order take out.
I am going to share with you a couple of cost saving tips or ideas to help stretch your hard-earned dollars on groceries. I’m not recommending any financial advice. I’m sharing my personal experience that has worked for my situation and my family.
Get comfortable talking about money.
Create and stick to a budget.
Maintain a consistent grocery order.
Limit the number of times we order take out.
Use credit cards to my advantage.
Maximize memberships to protect my time.
Get Comfortable Talking About Money
This is a vital step in managing your money. You must be able to talk about the money you have, the money you are spending, any gaps you may experience, and any financial goals you want to achieve. Everyone needs money and everyone spends money. The topic of money needs to become a normal conversation among parents, partners, and spouses. If you are not currently talking about money, you need to start.
Think of your family like running a business and every business needs to understand the amount of money coming in and the amount of money going out. Responsible business owners have an understanding of cash flow, debt, investments, and savings. Your family is a business and needs a similar understanding of money.
Your family business has recurring expenses such as rent or a mortgage, utilities, groceries, insurance, childcare, gas, pets, and car payments. You may also have optional recurring expenses such as subscriptions and memberships. You also have miscellaneous expenses that may vary based on activities you and your family participate in, travel, eating out, etc… Perhaps you also have student loans or other types of debt. All of those spending categories need to be part of an ongoing conversation to understand how much money you have coming in and where your money is being spent.
If you are not talking about these things, especially the recurring expenses, then I strongly recommend you do so you at least have an idea of where your money is going and how you can stretch those hard earned dollars. My husband and I have a financial planning “check-in” (call it a family meeting if you want) once a month to see how we are doing on our spending and savings. You may want to consider something similar to really stay on top of your money.
The rest of this article is going to be difficult to include in your family business if you aren’t talking about money.
Create and Stick to a Budget
Once you start talking about money and begin understanding where you money is going, then you can focus in on your grocery expenses. If you need some help figuring out how to track your grocery spending, then follow these steps:
Either open up your checking account or login to your credit card account and look at your statements.
Literally write down the amount of money you spent for the past three months on groceries and add it up.
Now, also take a look at how much money you are spending on eating out (yes, that Starbucks run needs to be added to this list).
Got your average number for groceries and eating out per month?
Now let’s ask the question – were you surprised? Pleasantly surprised or disbelief surprised? This exercise gave you perspective on where your money is going for the ongoing expense of eating. You are always going to need to eat and there will always be an expense to eating – you now have an idea of what that currently is for you.
You now need to ask yourself, if you are spending the right amount of money on eating. It is now time to set a budget and stick to it. How exactly do you do that? It’s really hard to suddenly cut a budget when you may not really be sure how much you should spend on groceries. What goes uneaten in your house? What is something you run out of and find yourself buying more of before the week is over? How often are you eating out and is that what you want to be doing? All of this factors into your budget. Obviously, the amount of income you have and other expenses also factor into your budget.
For groceries, here is an idea on how to figure out what your budget could be:
Decide on what you are going to eat for the week (or even a couple of days), then make a list based on the food you are going to eat.
Literally make a list of what you need before grocery shopping. Even if you order your groceries online, make a list.
STICK TO THE LIST!
Don’t grocery shop when you are hungry – based on research, you actually buy more food when you are grocery shopping hungry than when you are not hungry.
As you stick to the list and purchase your groceries, see what your cost actually is for the food you buy.
Throughout the week, see what you are actually eating and what you didn’t eat.
Adjust your list for the next time you shop. Continue to test out this until you feel like you’ve got a stable grocery list that you stick with.
That becomes your new budget.
This is just one idea on how to get an accurate budget for groceries. There are many more. Whichever way you get to a budget, the important thing is that you now have a budget.
Maintain a Consistent Grocery List
The dreaded conversations about food – what are we going to eat tonight? What do we have in the fridge to eat? What does our child need for a snack today? Did we prep any food or are we out of luck tonight?
My husband and I talk about food all the time. It also seems like we are always in the kitchen or it is always snack time. Our son eats 5 or 6 times per day and I just feel like I’m constantly thinking about food for him. What has helped our family is sticking with a standard grocery list every week and doing meal prep on Sundays and Thursdays. You can make a lot of food from a short list of options that are budget friendly.
You can also save yourself stress and time by committing to meal prep. Meal prep doesn’t have to be a long, drawn-out process. Meal prep also doesn’t have to be creating gourmet delicacies every day either. Simple is best. It’s easiest to prepare, it’s easiest to clean up, and it’s easiest to digest.
For a full list of what my family eats, check out my Resources page.
Limit the Number of Times We Order Take Out
One of the simplest ways we save money each week is sticking with our grocery list instead of eating out. I said simple, I didn’t say easy.
Sometimes it is just easier to order take out on a Friday night instead of cooking. Many times it is easier to order take out because we both work full-time and it is difficult to juggle two full-time jobs and getting food on the table when all of us are ready for dinner. This is also the main reason why we blow our grocery budget each week – it’s when we order take out or eat out.
Let me know if this sounds familiar to you:
Budget for weekly groceries and eating out is $200
Bought groceries on Sunday at - $175
Get a Starbucks on Monday because it’s Monday - $8
Go to Happy Hour with Friends at Work on Thursday - $25
Order Takeout on Friday Night for a Family of 3 - $65
Total actual money spent for the week: $273
Where does that extra $73 bucks come from in your budget? If we duplicate this example for 4 weeks of the month, we are over budget by $292 – which is over one week’s worth of groceries. Going out to eat really adds up over a short period of time.
I’m not saying don’t live a little and enjoy eating out from time to time. We all want to treat ourselves or have someone else cook and clean up every now and then. I get it, believe me. I’m just sharing an example for you to think about when running your family business.
I also wonder about the people who eat out every single day or even multiple times per day. What do you do for a living and how can you bring me into your company so I can have more spending cash?
Use Credit Cards to My Advantage:
When my husband and I were looking at our finances and talking about how we pay for groceries, we looked at cash, debit cards, and credit cards. We want our money to go as far as possible without overstretching ourselves each month. We decided, based on our financial style, to use a credit card for grocery purchases. I know credit cards can be a touchy subject and I am going to touch on them anyways. People have many opinions on whether or not someone should use a credit card. I am very conscious of paying our credit cards off each month and recognize the amount of financial pressure credit card debt has on many people. If you aren’t interested in this, feel free to skip ahead.
When evaluating which credit card to use for our grocery purchases, we researched multiple credit card companies and landed on the Capital One Walmart Credit Card. We made this choice for a couple of reasons:
I’ve had a different Capital One credit card for over 10 years and have always been happy with their terms and customer service.
It has no annual fee.
This credit card seemed to have the best rewards with 5% cash back on Walmart.com online orders, 2% cash back on Walmart stores and fuel, restaurants, and travel, and 1% cash back on everything else.
To restate that for those who order groceries online – the Capital One Walmart credit card give you 5% cash back on Walmart.com online grocery orders.
Since you have now figured out how much money you spend on groceries, you could see the potential benefit of 5% cash back. Just for fun, let’s say you spend about $1,000 per month on groceries for a family of 4. So about $12,000 per year. If you are using this credit card then by the end of year you could have $600 in cash back which is 2 weeks of groceries (so long as you are paying your credit card on time). That definitely helps the bottom line of your family business.
Maximize Memberships to Protect My Time
Grocery shopping takes time. Valuable, precious time. Grocery shopping is a necessity for many who are not homesteading or growing all of their own food (which is the majority of Americans). When supercenter and grocer memberships started hitting the market, I was skeptical. I WAS someone who liked to go grocery shopping and pick my own food, especially my fruits and vegetables. Once I became a Mom and had hardly anytime at all to leave the house and grocery shop, I strongly reconsidered a membership for groceries.
It is one of the best financial decisions I’ve made since becoming a Mom for a bunch of reasons:
I stick with a pre-defined grocery list that is part of my budget.
Online ordering has completely eliminated my impulse buying in a grocery store. I am not walking down aisles or seeing “sale” signs that draw me in. All I see is my set grocery list.
I don’t have to use gas to drive to and from the grocery store.
I can re-purpose the time I used to spend grocery shopping to other things!
We have a Walmart+ membership. It costs $98.00 per year to be a member, or $1.88 per week. Here is what I love about the membership:
You only have to build your grocery list once, then save it. After that, you just use the “reorder” feature which catalogs your previous purchases so you can easily click through what you need to reorder without having to search for your items all over again.
Free shipping on orders $35.00 or more. Which is basically every order.
Excellent customer service by Walmart for both orders and deliveries.
Free, additional, membership for Paramount+ streaming. We love watching Yellowstone so this was a nice bonus.
I would say that spending an additional $1.88 per week to limit my impulse buying (which is more than $1.88) and to get my time back is worth the money.
I’ve now transitioned from a person who loved grocery shopping to someone who LOVES my grocer membership. I don’t have any issues with others picking my fruits and vegetables. We have had a handful of times when our produce wasn’t ideal – we called and they replaced it. I rarely go to the grocery store now and when I do, I feel like a fish out of water because I don’t know where stuff is and I literally hate waiting in lines. Even if it is a short line…
All of that to say, we use a membership at $1.88 per week and paired it with a credit card with the potential of earning $600 per year in cash back to get the most out of our ongoing grocery expenses.
Summary
I hope you have found a budgeting idea or two that will help you run your family business. When running your family business, here is what I recommend:
Get comfortable talking about money.
Create and stick to a budget.
Maintain a consistent grocery order.
Limit the number of times we order take out.
Use credit cards to my advantage.
Maximize memberships to protect my time.
Everyone has to eat and we eat multiple times per day. Each of us has to figure out the food we will offer our kids and ourselves, how we shop for it, and how we pay for it. Although I focused on groceries, this mindset and process can be applied to many areas of your family business. One that I would recommend you look at are your subscriptions. Sometimes you forget the subscriptions you have or you may not be using them – that’s a great way to save more money each month.