My October Grocery Challenge

In the spirit of pushing myself to new frugal extremes I have set a goal for myself during the month of October. After careful examining our budget and wracking my brain on areas that we can continue to cut, as I am always of the belief that I can do better, and there are two areas that we have decided to slice and dice. We are dropping our monthly cushion budget, known as sanity, by $30 to a monthly allotment of $20, and have reduced our grocery budget by $40 to a monthly allotment of $340. Inspired by “America’s Cheapest Family,” I found myself feeling embarrassed that their family of 7 survives on $300 a month on groceries, and my wife and I “stretch” ourselves on $380. Ideally I would love to trim this down to $200, but we’ll try and baby step our own way there. As a rule of thumb we are heavily restricting our produce buying to items that are below $1 a pound. We essentially did a test run of this during the month of September, and without breaking a sweat come under our monthly grocery budget by over $100. 

            So suddenly now I love pears, celery, bananas, certain kinds of lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower and corn. I could not have hand picked a better month to cut our grocery bill, as we generally shop on the weekends and October will be a five weekend month. I will certainly keep you filled in on our weekly progress, with receipt tallies and all.