Budget: $75.00
Actual: $73.90

We went grocery shopping on Tuesday which has been a habit we’ve fallen into the last several weeks so I think I’m just going to designate that as Grocery Shopping Day. And that means I will be shifting how I do the meal planning, so instead of meals running Sunday – Saturday, they’re going to run Tuesday-Tuesday.

So… our meal plan is:

Tuesday (01/24) – Out with a Panera gift card from the in-laws
Wednesday (01/25) – Crock pot minestrone (I’m not even kidding… this is flippin’ delicious)
Thursday (01/26) – Leftovers
Friday (01/27) – Pasta Corn Casbah and salad probably
Saturday (01/28) – Out with family to celebrate my grandma’s birthday. We’re hitting up the Spaghetti Factory!
Sunday (01/29) – Quinoa burgers with homemade tater tots
Monday (01/30) – New England Pot Roast
Tuesday (01/31) – Pasta with peanut sauce

Lunch for me is leftovers, again. For Alex, lunch is still Chickpea Hummus Burgers. For breakfast, I’m still on a cereal kick but I’m also going to make Emily’s Maple Pecan Granola. I got turkey to make breakfast burritos for Alex so he is set as well.

Since this means that this week is my last grocery spending week in January (next Tuesday will be the 31st so there will be spending there…but only 1 day), let’s take a look at my numbers for the month:

(Click to make this picture larger)

A note about the weekly totals above – for the week ending January 7th, it includes my Project: Food Budget Week 1 total ($72.39) plus miscellaneous groceries we bought prior to beginning the project. The week ending January 14th is a bunch of hodge podge Kroger spending that totaled to $69.12 – this was random skin care/health/beauty products, vitamins, etc… The savings for those two weeks was my Kroger plus card savings to that point (January 14th) divided in half, plus whatever savings I had saved on our grocery trip the week ending January 7th. Confusing enough for ya??

Anyway, the point is that’s all of our Kroger spending for the month of January.

Our weekly spending is $84.16 which is higher than what I have been budgeting but this number might be inflated because of the random spending from the week ending January 14th. Our total spending for the month of January is $336.64, which is $36.64 higher than what we budgeted ($75/week would be $300/month).

This really puts things in perspective for me. Ultimately, I would love to drastically cut the monthly budget down to $200 a month but that is not going to happen over night. BUT! By reducing my weekly budget to $70/week instead of $75.00, we can shave $20.00 off, bringing our monthly budget to $280. So going into February, I am adjusting my weekly grocery budget to $70. With the way things have been going, this won’t be too difficult but standing at the register will definitely be more of a nail-biter than it is now.

Reducing the budget by $5.00 also means I will need to probably stop recipe hopping so much and stick with a few recipes that I cycle in and out every couple weeks. It also means I need to kick it up on the couponing. I have a lot of coupons, but I only use about 3-4 per week. The rest of our savings strictly comes from Kroger plus. I might even need to start looking into alternative places to buy things like paper towels, toilet paper, etc… But, we’ll just see how February goes.

On the bright side, I am very proud of us that we have already saved $78.62 this year! I don’t know what our totals looked like last year, but I guarantee they weren’t this good.

If you read my post last week, you might remember I mentioned something about tracking my coffeehouse spending as well. I had set myself at a weekly budget of $15.00. This budget will run from Tuesday-Tuesday, too, just to make things simple. So how did I do for spending from January 17th-24th?

Not so great! I spent $19.64. That’s an overage of $4.64, which means I had about one drink too many.

However, I decided to not worry about the budget for this past week so I could get an honest look at what I would normally spend, with no restrictions at all. It’s about what I thought it was, which was in the $20-25 range. Ridiculous!

So for this next week, I’m really going to watch my spending. I’ve already spent $4.02 so that leaves only $10.98! Let’s see if I can make it.

*If you’d like to snag your own Grocery Savings Tracker spreadsheet, visit Couponing 101 to download it!*

*If you want to see my other Project: Food Budget posts, click here! Or to find out where Project: Food Budget came from, click here!*

Participating Blogs in Project: Food Budget – 

• Emily Levenson
• Dairy-Free Cooking
• Test Kitchen Tuesday
• Red Pen Mama
• Acquired Tastes
• Fit Flexitarian
• Warm As Pie 
• Katy Rank Lev
• My Inner Healthy
• Little Blue Hen
• xox, b
• What da Health?
• Project Food Budget 2.0
• Fresh…A New Chapter
• Chandeleah
• Two Eggs Over Easy
• That’s Just Me
• Eat Whole Be Vital
• Four Happy Violets
• Naturally {Un}refined
• Pgh Dad
• yogabeautylife
• Charmingly Modern
• naMAMAste