When you start budgeting the honest truth is that food and shopping are the two categories where you’re going to feel the biggest pinch.  Grocery budgets aren’t hard – you won’t feel that big of a pinch once you set some processes in place, even if you eat at home a lot, as we do.  For the most part, we cook what we want to, we’re just much more planful about it.  You’re going to feel the biggest pinch and going to have to adjust your behavior the most with eating out.  I’m making assumptions here, of course.  If eating out is important to you, you can absolutely fund that category fully.  The reality is, I think very few of us would choose to fund that over saving for something that is really important to us (like retirement, a future home, a vacation, or recreational endeavor).  People tend to spend a lot on eating out when they’re not tracking what they’re spending – once you see it, it’s hard to spend your money there.  To benchmark, Dave Ramsey suggests your total food budget (groceries + eating out) should represent about 10-15% of your take home pay.  In our budget, we target about 6-7%.  We weren’t shooting for a certain percentage, just a what felt like a reasonable dollar amount for a household of two adults.  The percentage, however, provides guidance if you’re not sure where to start.  Strategies for managing spending in groceries are very different for managing spending in eating out, so let’s tackle them separately.

GROCERIES

Your best tool to manage your grocery spending is planning.  Anything that you spend time on planning will have a better outcome.  Planning is the difference between success and happenstance.  Planning is an under-rated hack.  There are three things I do that help me achieve a reasonable grocery budget month after month.

1. Menu Planning
2. Grocery Pricing Comparison
3. Buying Staples in Bulk

Menu Planning

I’m not sure why I waited so long to menu plan.  It is such a great tool to maximize your time, your grocery budget, and limit eating out.  Throughout my single years and even in the early years of our marriage, I would usually go to Costco on Sundays (every week or every other week) and get what looked good for meals that week.  Salad greens, fresh fruit, bulk meat, and snacks.  And then I’d wing it through the entire week.  I usually had things to pack for lunch every day but took dinner prep day by day.  This is the opposite of planning.  Waiting until the night of to decide what you’re going to have for dinner is a bad plan.  Because by the time I’d get home from a work day and long commute, and then exercise my dog, it was late.  Takeout teriyaki or pizza can easily become a crutch.  But if I have a plan and the ingredients to pull it off, it’s easy!

So here’s what I do.  In my monthly grocery haul, I make sure to always have items for breakfast.  That’s easy.  We can always throw together eggs and breakfast meat, oatmeal, yogurt & granola, or toast/bagels for breakfast.  These are staples I always have on hand.  For lunches, we rely on dinner leftovers.  It’s just the easiest and most efficient way to plan lunches especially if you’re already making the dinner.  I just make sure that I’m cooking enough for at least two leftover lunches for my husband and I.  That leaves dinner as the only meal I need to menu plan.  Every Saturday, I meal plan for the week ahead.  I’ve started planning for a whole month – because it’s fun for me and because, why repeat the activity week after week, if I can extend the planning?  After I plan my menu, I scan the recipes for what I don’t have and make a grocery list.  At some point during the weekend, I’ll run to the store to get the ingredients I don’t have and then we are set for the week.  At times, I’ll do this every other week instead of weekly.

Meal planning requires having a vast catalog of “go to” recipes that you can easily scan for what sounds appealing and/or right for the weather and season.  I’m always feeding my recipe catalog, leveraging a few “go-to” magazines or food blogs for new recipe inspiration.  This keeps things fresh and fun.  I enjoy looking for new recipes on occasion, but not having to rely on searching for a new recipe for everything I’m going to cook.  And finally, for those in your home not involved in the menu planning, it’s nice to publish the menu for the week somewhere in your kitchen.  That way they know what’s ahead on the menu and can get excited for it like you do!

Grocery Pricing

I don’t clip coupons or go out of my way to shop sales.  If it’s mailed to me, I will browse the ad of stores I shop at and see what I can take advantage of on sale, but I don’t seek out ads online.  You can be successful with this approach, it just isn’t my approach.  I try to spend as little time as possible grocery shopping.  I cook a lot, which takes time, and I don’t want to spend time running back and forth to the grocery store and chasing deals.  For this reason, we shop at Costco once a month.  We load up on the things that we use regularly and that are cheaper there and then supplement with weekly or bi-weekly trips to the grocery store for fresh items (certain dairy items and produce).  If I could do all my shopping at once for the month, I would.  But fresh items don’t tend to hold over that long, especially summer produce.  I dream of the day that we grow, hunt, or raise a large percentage of our food decreasing our dependency on the industrial food system of even fresh food.  I’ll get there one day when I have a huge garden and am growing most of my produce.  One day, we’ll learn the basics of big game hunting and be fortunate enough to harvest an animal, taking on the massive responsibility of harvesting your own meat.

I did some research on grocery prices.  I essentially listed out all of the staple items I buy regularly and looked at pricing among my three favorite grocers.  Here’s where I shop:

• Costco: At Costco, we buy eggs, chicken, cheeses, and some long-holding dairy products, toilet paper & paper towels, sparkling water, some fruit, nuts, olive oil, spices, snacks and a few kitchen and bath supplies.  We shop once a month and load up on what we’ll go through in a month. I have on hand extras of staples – essentially a month’s worth of food as an emergency supply.  We always have this on hand, although we rotate through it so that it’s getting used up.  It’s nice to have this, not just for an emergency, but so that if we end up going through certain items faster than anticipated in my monthly Costco run, I don’t have to run to Costco to get another of that item.  I can just pull from the backstock and replace it when I go next month.
• Azure Standard:  Azure is an online only grocery store.  They’re based out of Dufur, OR where they have a huge warehouse.  They carry only wholesome and mostly organic products. Their standards are high.  You won’t find conventional products, processed foods, name brands, sodas, etc.  They mill their own flours and buy a lot of staples in bulk quantities packaging and branding them under their own name.  You can find a lot of pantry staples there for cheaper prices and can always find a “clean” version of something you want on hand.  You order online, can have it shipped to you direct for a charge, but better yet can participate in a drop where you pick up locally monthly.  The pick-up is free of shipping.  It’s a beautiful model – I love that it leverages neighborhood drops and the products they carry are great.  I buy a lot of soaps, flours, and pantry staples from Azure.
• Winco:  My weekly or bi-weekly grocery run is typically to Winco.  They have the cheapest prices on fresh items like dairy and produce.  They don’t have much by way of organic produce, but their produce prices are really good.  And they have great quality yogurts, sour cream, etc. at some of the cheapest prices. 

Buying in Bulk

Buying in bulk is a hack.  You hear people talk about it a lot.  There are ways to fail at buying in bulk.  First, you don’t want to buy something that you don’t use a lot of and that will expire before you can work through it.  This is where planning comes in.  I’m always thinking of what we use a lot of what are the cheapest ways to buy it.  First you have to decide on what products you like.  Flour, for instance, can be really cheap in 25 or 50 lb bags.  But you have to consider the quality and type of the flour that you like or want to use.  And then, once you land on a brand or a type, you can figure out how to source that product in the cheapest way.  We go through a ton of flour.  In 2024, we made a goal to make all of our bread products.  About every 2-3 weeks, we’ll make 4 loaves of sourdough bread and freeze 3 of them.  So we typically buy flour in 25 lb bags.  We can get the best pricing on it this way either through Azure or direct from a flour mill.  A few other items I buy in bulk are vinegars.  I buy the basics like white wine, red wine, and rice vinegar in gallon jugs.  They last a long time and I can get better quality vinegars and much cheaper prices buy taking this approach.  I also buy hand soap and dish liquid in bulk.  I can get good quality, clean soaps at a fraction of the cost of buying individual 8-10 oz. bottles.  Azure is great for this.  We buy eggs and half and half in bulk at Costco – this saves us quite a bit of money.  Costco is great for bulk items.  Things like blocks of cheese, packages of sliced cheese, fresh mozzarella, cheese sticks, etc.  You can save a ton of money buying things that you use regularly in larger quantities at Costco.  Just be sure to consider the per unit, per ounce, per pound cost when comparing pricing. 

EATING OUT

On our journey of budgeting, spending money on eating out hit me differently as I thought more about it and especially as inflation has wreaked havoc on our current economy.  Fuel, wages, and food costs have skyrocketed in the last few years.  The thought that hit me differently was that we are paying for someone to make our food.  Of course that’s the case, I always knew that.  The new revelation was that the cost of the sandwich we were buying included a little bit of the rent of the sandwich shop, a little bit of the now ridiculously high minimum wage, and then of course a little bit of profit the owner needed to make.  I was literally paying someone a wage to make me a sandwich.  Ok, we don’t need to do that anymore.  And we vowed whether we had the money or not, we weren’t going to continue with undisciplined spending in an area that we actually cared little about.  We’d make the extra effort to pack sandwiches on road trips, be a bit more disciplined around nearly always packing lunches for work, and have a menu plan that we could adhere to during the week to eliminate the risk of getting takeout for dinner.  Our routine now is to set aside a reasonable amount for eating out and place that amount in cash in an envelope at the beginning of the month.  It’s the easiest way to ensure we don’t overspend in a very discretionary area. 

A couple other helpful things we do to stretch our eating out budget is we limit what we order for drinks. I’ll typically just drink water because I don’t really care about having a soda.  And we try not to drink alcohol out.  We’re not sticklers about this and will certainly have a glass of wine at a winery or a pint of beer at a brewery, but in general, we don’t order alcohol out. It’s already fairly expensive as it is to drink at home.  Drinking out is atrocious.

I know you’ll find unique catalysts that work for you and your family. The most difficult part about budgeting is finding a system that works for you, creating a budget and getting started. Once you get the feel for it, it actually becomes fun and very satisfying. I hope the catalysts I’ve shared provide a starting point and motivation to you on your journey of managing your finances. What a gift it is to manage what God has entrusted to us.