Grocery Budget – January 2017

I believe it’s time to experiment with a new type of post. I’m not sure how well this will go over but I figure some people might find it interesting on how I spend my money when it comes to buying food. Now, I already talked about my budget and how much I allocate every month to food. I went shopping today and decided that I would post the receipts and talk about what I purchased.

In the past, we would just shop at Walmart for everything and when they introduced their Savings Catcher App, we thought we were just saving even more. I never really bothered with shopping around because I just thought I could afford it. And I can, but it’s not a smart way of getting the most out of our paychecks

I first start off by viewing the grocery stores weekly ads online. I believe almost every store does this now and a simple google search will show you what stores are near by. This trip I decided to stop at Piggly Wiggly and a discount food store named Save-A-Lot since they are right next to each other where I live. The weekly ads on their websites allow you to “Add” items to your shopping list and then email/print them out for use in the store. This makes a convenient way to make lists. You can view the ads for  Piggly Wiggly’s and Save-A-Lot if you feel so inclined.

To make it easier, I simply copy each item with the price into a program called Zim. I like this program cause I can easily add check boxes to each item which allows me to simply check them off as I find them at the store. Then I can just print it off like normal. You can do the same thing in notepad or just go off the emails if you want, the choice is up to you!

Here’s what I wanted to pick up from the weekly ads.

I don’t usually go into the store with a plan on what meals to make, even though I probably should. I like to just pick up the things I know my family and I will eat and then go from there. The items on the bottom without checkboxes are just things that need to be picked up. When it comes to meat and vegetables, we just make meals based on whatever is on sale. There’s usually some form of chicken or beef on sale every week and thankfully no one in our family is a picky eater. Dark meat or white meat is just fine for us!

The first stop was Piggly Wiggly. Here’s the receipt with what got purchased.

The cheese was not on sale so I paid full price for it. Up next is Sunny D for a buck each. I decided to pick up two since my son loves to drink juice and I sometimes feel nostalgic for it. The banquet meals for $1 each are what I call “lazy meals.” It’s for when we don’t want to cook but want to eat something. I also use it whenever the wife and kid are gone and I want to eat something.

Up next are two huge bags of crinkle cut french fries for $1.50 each. Everybody loves french fries and this is way cheaper than getting them from Mcdonald’s. I also picked up some pop tarts for 3/$5. I’m not that big of a fan of them but my wife and son love them, so who am I to keep it from them.

The best deal comes from my meat purchases. I bought two packages of boneless chicken breasts for $1.49 a lb. One of the packages was frozen and went straight into the freezer. The other was put in the fridge to be used this week. It’s a great price for chicken breast though!

I also bought a five pound box of bacon for $10. I didn’t know what to expect from them but when we got them home, I was surprised that it’s just a big box of slices. And with bacon prices going up lately (single packages of bacon are going for $3-4), I figure this might be a gamble that pays off. We went ahead and broke the box down and put the bacon in a few freezer bags. Whenever we need bacon, we can just pull out one freezer bag for the week.

I originally went for Bounty paper towels for 9.99, but when getting there realized that their store brand was cheaper per sq ft. There’s a few things that I don’t want to skimp on, like toilet paper, but for paper towels, this is more than fine. I also didn’t pick up the T-bones because, quite frankly, they didn’t look so great.

For a total of $66.91. Not a bad haul from Piggly Wiggly.

Up next is the haul from Save-A-Lot, a local discount food store here in North Carolina.

I picked up quite a few cans of beans and diced tomatoes for some chili that I plan on making in the future. At 59 cents a can, you can’t really beat that. Some notable standouts was a 15-ct box of corndogs for $4.99 which, again, is mostly for that lazy meal that we find ourselves wanting to have. We’re also trying some store brand food with their Mac-n-cheese and their store cheese nips that are both $1.49 each. Also 2 for 88 cent Yoplait yogurt is a heck of a deal.

Again, for $58.72 this is a pretty decent haul. The weird oddity here is the Frozen Pork Tails for $9.78. Not sure why they came up as pig tails since I definitely picked up Ribeyes and I verified the package as well as the price per lb.

This grocery shopping day should last us through the month and put us under our $300 food budget by about $60 bucks. What I’ll do is go ahead and deposit the $60 bucks into my dividend portfolio next month to take advantage of the extra money.

Thanks for reading, I’ll try and do this again in 2 weeks for February!