Saturday, December 6, 2008

Grocery Shopping for a Poverty Party


Back in the days of feeding a teenage boy martial artist and a teenage girl dancer, who each burned about 8,000 calories a day, I used to spend a lot of money on groceries. I was a coupon queen and if I was really on my game I sometimes saved $30 a week.
For the past 2 years, I have only been feeding 2 people and I got a little lax on the coupon clipping. I decided to keep track of my food $$$ spending and my food $$$ savings for one month. I started clipping coupons and reading the sale ads again. I kept the receipts and tracked my coupon savings from Nov 6th to Dec 6th. Tonight I reviewed my results.
SPENT: $471.19 Mr Sunshine State said "WHAAAAAT????? Did that include the COSTCO BOOZE SHOPPING TRIP?" Ummmmm, NO. That was an additional $155.00!
SAVED: $118.32
This is coupon savings+free items of the B1G1 variety.
EYEOPENERS: Of the free items, $21.62
was free meat...one package each of chicken breasts, pork chops, London Broil and bacon.
Mr Sunshine State believes A Banana A Day Keeps Most Of The Doctors Away.
His banana addiction cost us $5.80
Little Miss Sunshine State has a serious DIET COLA addiction. That set us back
$22.34 !!!!!!!!!!!
We have a combined Junk Food Junkie habit that consists of cookies for him and Peanut Crack&M's and Funyuns and Salt & Vinegar Chips for me.
This no good, horrible, very bad, awful total was.......
$25.77 AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH.
MUST. STOP. THE. MADNESS. 90% of that madness went onto MY HIPS.
I think it would be too hard to make any changes to this in December. The Adult Martial Artist is coming for 2 weeks and I do a lot of baking at this time of year.
My project for January will be to seriously decrease the junk food budget and try to plan more meals around what's on sale.
Tune in the first week of Feb. to see if I was successful.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I know, I can't believe how much the price of food has gone up in the past year. Even dried beans have almost doubled. Okay, so they were 80 cents before and now they're around $1.30, so that's not much money, but still.

BOSSY said...

Bossy is at her wit's end with the food budget, as if she had a WIT to begin with!

Cat said...

I used to be so good about coupons, buying on sale ect. Now I just find it hard to even plan a meal, because I never know who's going to be home to eat it.

Green Girl said...

Oh dear. Good luck. The junk food and soda is such a dealbreaker--as is MEAT! And cereal. I am amazed at few bags of food $100 buys anymore.

Mrs. G. said...

We can be poverty party sisters in this endeavor.