1. “What?” you ask. “That’s $25 per week for one person, right?”

Frugal grocery shopping can help no matter if buying for one or five in a household. One person can take on the challenge of spending no more than $25 per week, but no, there are two of us in my house. The food blogger who challenged me to do the $25 per week grocery haul, Patty Cake from pattycakespantry.com, has a household of five – and she managed to keep her groceries under $25 every week for the most part.

grocery budgeting
Grocery Budget Experiment Week 5

My Experience

with $25-Per-

Week

Grocery

Shopping

I can tell you that after five weeks of trying to spend no more than $25 every week on groceries, it has been hard to do. In fact, I wasn’t successful at it every week. The first two weeks were easier for me.

The week that was my husband’s birthday, I spent way over that amount. Since it was a special occasion, I didn’t include the party food in our household budget that week.

Should You Give In to Treats?

This week I spent $34.63. I could have managed to spend $24.70 if I hadn’t given in to my whims and bought a box of Clif White Chocolate Macadamia Nut bars and bacon. However, I love those bars and had been looking for them. Finally, I saw them on this grocery shopping trip and couldn’t resist bringing a box of them home with me. If I would have taken a closer look at the nutritional content, I may have hesitated in buying the bars because each one has 20 grams of sugar. That is entirely too much sugar, and the calories are quite high – 260. The fiber is only 3 grams, but the protein is 9 grams. See how easy it was for me to talk myself into them? The macadamia bars were my treat to myself – and worth every bite.

Buy Large Packages of Food to Freeze for Later

Then there is the bacon. I wanted a small package of bacon. I noticed a large package for only $4.95, but I didn’t need that much. The smaller packs were nearly as much as the large one, so I chose the latter and froze some for later.

If you’ve kept up with my grocery budget challenge, you know that I love leftovers. The ten pounds of lean ground beef I blogged about in one of the previous posts of this $25-per-week challenge have provided plenty of leftovers for a month. Since I don’t have a family of five to feed at home like Patty Cake, I don’t stick closely to a menu. A pressure cooker chicken soup recipe or simple mini meatloaf and veggie meal is enough for three or four meals.

Look for my next blog post about Week 6 and the overall grocery budget challenge. It has been interesting.

Food budgeting is a good idea because it saves you money and puts extra change in your pocket.

See you next time!

Leave a Comment Below:

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.