In November 2008, I wrote about eating on a budget and nearly eliminating eating out and changing my family’s household of how much money is diverted towards eating at restaurants to what is purchased at grocery stores.
I’ve managed to trim our grocery bills from $200-$300 to anywhere around $80-$140. But I realize that eating healthy comes at a price. No more Whole Foods and no more looking to buy whatever I want (Costco has so much) but now we are checking out a variety of grocery stores to get an idea of how some of them price their products.
If anything, my wife and I came to the thinking right now that if there is one person we won’t hold back on, it’s our son. He doesn’t eat much anyway so, it’s OK. But for the wife and I, we are eating more bran and oat-based products in the morning but if there is one thing that has irked me is that when we go to grocery stores, the types of food that are cheap and low priced are canned foods and processed foods.
I know that processed foods carry a lot of sodium and I know that many healthy people have told me to stay away from processed foods but because we are sticking to this budget, we are eating Oscar and Mayer turkey or chicken slices, we still eat only whole wheat bread and tuna (in water and not oil) but last week we bought a lot of Ramen. And I know this is not the ramen that I have eaten in Japan or Taiwan, this is the processed type which we just add boiling water and then there’s frozen food. It seems the frozen food at grocery stores are really dropping price (especially the discount grocery stores).
As for red meat, we only purchase ground beef once a month. We were never big meat eaters, so that is fine with us.
For spaghetti, as much as I love putting so much into it, now we just focus on whole wheat spaghetti noodles but to cut costs of not buying all the vegetables, we just buy sauces that have them already. Another thing that I’m trying out is instead of buying the sauce in glass bottles, we are trying canned spaghetti sauce because they are only $1.00 for one can while a bottle for a similar amount cost around $2.08.
As for vegetables, for sandwiches I used to buy certain types of lettuce and had many onions and tomatoes but I actually cut down on that. Mainly not because of the cost but I realize that we don’t eat so much that they stay in the fridge for too long. The same with potatoes. I would use them to cook maybe 4-5 but then the remainder in the bag start growing sprouts and I end up throwing them away. But we do eat vegetables, mainly broccoli and carrots and for fruits, we buy apples.
And for apples, we don’t buy them in bulk because we don’t go through them as quickly.
As for beverages, I cut soda out years ago but my wife, her happiness is Diet Pepsi and she will continue to drink a lot of that forever. But I started buying more water. For those who don’t know me, I don’t drink water as much as I should, so I’m trying to. It seems that water is something I can easily drink after a workout but not just whenever I want. So, I’m still having to flavor them with the sugarless ice tea or other flavor packs. But I’m trying to get my 8 glasses of water a day.
We still do not eat out. Well, I’ll take that back. With Subways $5 foot-longs, the wife and I indulged twice in February and for my son’s birthday, we did celebrate at a pizza place. But I do miss eating out at restaurants and it’s hard to believe how much we frequented restaurants in the past and now, because of us trying to trim our budget, we really don’t go out all that much.
But overall, that is how things have been since November.