I have a $350 food budget for the entire month, but I always end up going over it significantly to get us through the last three weeks of the month. My question is, how can I stretch my grocery budget each month? What are some foods that stretch meals, or foods that I should buy or avoid to make sure the food lasts for the month? Any recipes that are particularly filling , that last, that I should check out, that a 13 month old can eat as well? I spend a great deal on snacks and baby foods for my 13 month old. I don't currently have a blender, so I don't make those foods. If you have any tips or ideas on how you keep a strict grocery budget, I would appreciate it. Thanks in advance.
Well, I think your first step would be to get a blender. Blenders cost money, of course, but think of how much you'll save when you can make your own baby food rather than buying it prepackaged. It's worth the cost.
Starches are foods that tend to be cheap and stretch far. For example, a large bag of rice will only cost you a few bucks and can be stretched out over several meals....and your baby cant eat it, too. The same goes for potatoes and pastas. Then you can spend more money on produce for the nutritional side. Meats tend to be expensive, so consider cutting back on your consumption of those.
I have a 13 month old as well i don't buy a lot of snacks for him but when i do i usually go to the dollar tree and get him fruit snack bars and things like that you might want to think about getting the snacks at the dollar tree i spend like 10 bucks on snacks for him going to dollar tree and he loves them. Also try getting coupons and stuff dollar tree now accepts coupons so it's even cheaper. If you shop at walmart make sure to see what deals other stores have that way you can add match your items if it's cheaper some where else that's what i do and i usually spend less than 300 on groceries.
Include beans in your meals. For example, instead of using all ground beef, substitute half of the beef with black beans (or whatever beans your family prefers). This helps to make your meat last a little bit longer. Also, see when your local stores reduce the prices on the meat. If I can get to Wal-Mart before 8 a.m. I can find some great deals to stock up on. I have a toddler as well. She eats most of what we eat, so we do not purchase separate snacks just for her. Thirdly, purchase frozen vegetables as they are cheaper than fresh and they can also help to bulk up your meals in a healthy, money-saving way. We get a huge bag of mixed frozen vegetables for about $6 and chop it up in stir frys, spaghetti, and soup. I hope you are able to meet your goal!
Thanks for the good ideas. The only reason why I buy snacks and things like that for my daughter, is because she's super picky and already pretty small for her age, so I tend to splurge on the Gerber snacks and foods that she will eat. Also, are there better sales at ALL Walmarts' before 8am? Because usually when I shop at Walmart, lately it has been pretty pricey, especially in comparison with other grocery stores.
Well first of all, you have a set budget, which is great, because you know just how much you are able to comfortably spend. Where I save money is that I watch for the flyers every week. Since meat is pricey, I will only buy meat when it is on sale and then I freeze it in a chest freezer. Another way I save money is by looking for coupons and buying anything that is necessary and non-perishable when it is on sale as well, such as toothpaste, shampoo and toilet paper for instance. The other thing I do is I go to the produce market and buy my produce from there since it is cheaper than in the grocery store. I found just by doing these small things that I save a lot of money each month, and have good stockpile of things that I need. Hope my post gives you some ideas.
This is what I do to get more food on the table without spending more money. First I check out the fruits and vegetables section at the fresh market. Not sure if the situation would be the same where you live but where I live, every morning the stall keepers will be pruning their fruits and vegetables. There's quite a lot that is thrown away. Not all of it is bad. Actually less than half is bad. But it doesn't look good and so it's thrown away. I usually offer to buy these discarded fruits and vegetables. Most of the time I get them free. Sometimes I buy something fresh and ask for the discarded ones. When I get home, I trim the discards, removing the bad parts. There is still a lot of very edible parts left over. So that takes care of my fruits and vegetables without spending a cent.
If you just made baby food and froze them in small containers you could save yourself a lot of money. Make your baby's snacks with healthy fruits, nuts and some granola. Chop some juicy dates and mash them lightly in a bag add other dried fruits chopped finely and some slivered nuts , granola and mix them together. Grease a plate spread the mixture and cut it into bars refrigerate as use as required. Fresh fruits make healthy snacks too. Mix a few kinds of chopped fruits together for your baby to get a taste of everything. These are healthy and wonderful for your child and you could save money on them. Buying whatever you need to on sale or coupons as others have suggested helps too.
You can buy a cheap, hand-held blender for a few dollars, and you'll save that money and more besides in the first month of use. You don't need something fancy to do the job. My favourite money-saving idea is to make soup the main meal once a week. Make a big pan of vegetable soup at the beginning of the month, and freeze it for future meals. This will also save on fuel bills and time, and your daughter can eat it as well. Have at least one meat-free meal a week. A mixed bean casserole is filling, nutritious and very cheap, and your daughter can have this, courtesy of your new hand-held blender. Go and buy that right now.
If there are some flea markets or thrift stores near you, I'm sure you could find a dirt cheap blender at one of them. You could also check the end caps at Target to see if there are any models they have on clearance, or returned ones that are heavily discounted. There is a web site I've been reading frequently called Budget Bytes (Log In), that has a lot of cost friendly recipes along with a price breakdown for all of the ingredients. Stick with farmers markets for your produce if there are any in your area, they are almost always cheaper that big chain grocery stores. The trick is to only get what you will be using relatively soon, as the items tend to go bad faster (which is a good thing, means it's not radiated, or sprayed with wax or other chemicals). Also, try and plan on a set of recipes for the week that share common ingredients so you can use them all up and not waste anything. That's one of my biggest mistakes, I will see a recipe I want to try out and by the time I get all the ingredients for it, I will wind up spending like $25-$30 easily just on that one thing - whereas I could have gotten several meals out of that with a few basic ingredients, rather than buying a bunch of specialty items I probably won't use again. Pasta dishes are always easy on the wallet, and the items to make them can pretty much all be kept in your pantry so you can stock up on sauces and pasta when they are on sale. There are so many variations you could do with the sauces, from traditional tomato based sauce, to pestos, carbonara, alfredo's. etc. It's not too hard to keep meat in the picture, just skip the strip steaks and ribeyes, and stick with recipes that use cheaper cuts of meat. I often see beef and pork roasts on sale at my local grocery store, usually buy one get one free. You can cut these up into smaller portions and wrap them up and freeze them, instead of making the whole roast at once. Shredded beef/pork goes a long way in sandwiches and tacos and ragu's. You could also cut it into thin strips for stir fries. Bone in, skin on chicken thighs are also another favorite since there are so many ways you can come up with different dry rubs and glazes for them.
I don't know why I never go anywhere else besides the grocery store to get vegetables. I have a Farmer's Market up the street, every Saturday morning and a Produce Junction about 2 blocks away from my house. I would probably save a good amount, doing that. How long do you have to watch the store ads to get an idea of when the meats are going on sale? I go shopping often, and it seems like the meats are always expensive no matter what.
I often use pasta as a way to stretch my budget even further but I always end up not having enough sauce or meat, because those are always more expensive. We will eat pasta for lunch/ and or dinner and then I usuallly pack some for lunch and voila, within days, the pasta is gone. I'm also not a big "variety" cooker so I don't do much beyond regular spagghetti and lasagna. As for meats, I usually only get ground beef or chicken and that runs me a pretty penny, each time just to stay stocked up. I know I will probably save more money on bone in, skin chicken, but I always go for boneless, because it's healthier and easier for me to serve to my 13 month old, but I suppose to save money I could definitely make the switch. Thanks for all the good ideas, I'll put them into practice when I go shopping next week abnd let you guys know the results.
Every week I stock up on sale items I actually use, especially meat, chicken and staples. We have a large freezer which is great for stocking up. Try cooking more than one meal by doubling the size and putting the extra in the freezer for a later meal. Shop around the perimeter of the store and take a hard look at what you are buying. If it's a food that's altered from it's original form, such as crackers, cookies and many cereals,it's overpriced and over processed. Check and see if you have a salvage grocery store, which sells deeply discounted groceries. A lot of little things can add up over the long run.
That's a really good tip that I forgot. I do that quite frequently and we actually prefer the flavor that way. Also, I use a lot of ground turkey to help stretch more expensive meats and make it healthier for us, too. I have never seen that before. Wal-mart is one of those places that I rarely see real sales at, so I don't tend to go there for the sales.
Since you only have a 13 month old and yourself. Your budget shouldn't be that high unless you are not paying attention to the price that's on your packages. If you buy a lot of things that you can boil like greens, beans, rice, and such, you can always make cornbread for your meals once a week and just freeze what you have left. And when you know what you are going to eat each day, just take it from the freezer and thwart it out. When you come home you can pop it in the microwave and warm it up. You can buy salads to go with that and maybe some type of meat and there you should have enough to last for a month. Do this every Sunday and your baby food should be done with a blender that way you have more than enough for the month for the both of you. Do not buy a lot of junk food, buy good food.
I have learned that planning meals that use similar ingredients allows me to buy in bulk which in the long run, does save me a lot of money. You will also save a lot of money by not getting convenient foods. Do some of the work yourself to save money, pre-sliced cheese will cost you a lot more than a brick of cheese. It also helps to plan meals in such a way that you can make leftover meals as well. For example, get a whole chicken and make oven roasted chicken one night. Then out of the leftovers, make a chicken and pasta dish. Make sure you clean the carcass and bones and use the meat for a soup night later on down the road. That will give you three meals from one chicken.
I know this kind of goes against the grain, but I've also found that some food items *are* just cheaper to get from takeout instead of buying all the ingredients to make them yourself. There is a sub shop in my area called DiBella's that makes *huge* subs for like $8 (that's their full size sub, they also sell smaller ones, but the large one is the best deal). I can seriously split one of those into four and have lunch for four days off of it. They pile so much lunch meat on them it would cost me more than the price of the sandwich to buy all the meat and cheese they put on it, let alone everything else. Same thing when I would order a quart of some kind of house fried rice (usually comes with shrimp, chicken and pork in it), that thing would feed me for at least 3 or 4 meals easily. By the time I even bought the shrimp to put into it, I'm almost at what I paid for the quart.
A large chunk of my grocery budget goes towards, milk for my daughter, and her snacks, and frozen dinners for me to take to lunch. That is why my budget is so high. I only buy my daughter the Gerber Graduates snacks, like the yogurt melts and cheese snacks, because I know she loves them and will eat them. She is allergic to all berries and oatmeal, so that rules out quite a bit of things. As for milk, my daughter can go through a gallon, within 3 to 4 days, and as we all know milk is expensive. I actually have used the cornbread idea and had success with that, but a box doesn't seem to last that long. Admittedly I don't cook as often as I should or as healthy a meal, as I should, so I know I can cut some corners there as well. Also, salads usually go bad, because we don't eat a head of lettuce fast enough, or a bag of mixed salad, for that matter.
Lots of good suggestions here. When my youngest daughter was born I got a blender and made all of her food. Taking your lunch to work will help you to stay in your budget. We eat alot of soup and added a no meat day to our week. It would be something like grilled cheese and french fries or mac and cheese and a salad or soup. The size of the piece of meat you eat at each meal can be reduced to make the meat last longer. We take one large chicken breast cut it up into small pieces and several rice or beans or noodles to make it go farther. Good luck.
