grocery bill

I am wondering what is the average amount a family of 2,3,4 or even 5 spends each week at the grocery store. I try like the dickens to keep my bill for my family of 4 under $150.00 and cannot do it. I clip coupons, buy what is on sale and resist buying what I do not need. Granted I do not always shop perfectly, but on an average this is the way I shop. Any comments?

get rid of the family...just joshn'...It sounds like you have covered all the basis. One thing you might try (if you haven't already) is shopping for some items at the Dollar Stores/Fred's type places. Course even there you have to watch because sometimes they will actually be higher than say...Wal-Mart.

You also might want to try making your own items like "salad dressings," "jellies", and even your own candles. Sometimes buying in bulk helps as long as it isn't something that will end up being wasted. One more thing then I'll hush. I read a while back about a group of women who got together once a month (I think?) and they baked in bulk. Then...they cut everything up into portions and trade with each other. Complete meals were planned out and by sharing...they saved money AND time! If you had friends who wanted to try something like this, I think it would be fun and worth someone's invested time, don't you think? Just a thought...all this is coming from a person who would rather be run over by a milk truck than cook...hehehehe

I wouldn't go so far as jawjaw would, but I hate cookin' too (and if I'm gonna get run over by a truck I'd rather make it a Sara Lee truck most likely before I would a milk truck! ).

But there's six in our household and I think we average about $150.00 on groceries a week. I'm not sure as I'm about as dextrous with a budget as I am with a frying pan. I guess I'd have to save a month's worth of receipts.

But the thing is -- I don't buy fancy but I don't cook from scratch either (which is cheaper than packaged foods).

I think jawjaw's suggestion to shop when you can at the dollar stores and grocery discount places is a good one -- I try to go about every other month to stock up on drygoods and such and if I went more often (but they're not as convenient as the grocey store a mile up the road) I'd save a heck of a lot more!

One place about 6 miles away is great -- I can fill an entire cart for 50 bucks -- no lie! -- the same amount would cost me anywhere from double that to triple that in the regular grocery store (destiny makes me choose between slothfulness and wealth -- hey nothin's cheap, not even laziness!).

The only caution in such places is watch the expiration dates on some things, but all in all, it's a great deal. Hope you have one near you.

one grocery store to choose from - weekly bill $200 and up depending on what I need that week - supplement meat bill with moose/deer meat - family of 4 - one growing teenager that eats enough for two men........nearest Walmart, Superstore, bulk chain or any other grocery store an hour and a half away, occasionally get groceries there when we're in town.

Course, thats $200 Cdn, which is probably about $170 US right now so I guess I'm not doing that bad

Oyster-ears is back. YAHOO.

FYI ladies, for months she held the most replied- to post in the forums. It was about kids and television.

I tallied our Super Fresh bills for the last 2 weeks and came up with an average of (and I'm embarrassed)$190.00 per week. And there were no special occasions for those weeks either.

This is to feed our family of four. And believe it or not, it's has definitely come down since our oldest left for college.

Oh yeah, we have a dog too!

I will add that we feed more than just the four of us, especially on the weekends. We tend to have kids hanging out and they stick around for meals too. I don't mind at all. I love to feed people. It makes me happy for some odd reason.

During the week I don't feed their friend's meals because they go home for dinner on school nights, but we do tend to dole out the Gatorade, juice boxes, fruit snacks, chex mix, you name it, to all the kids skating in the driveway, or stopping by after school with my daughter. Her school is only a block away and the word must be out that you can get free snacks at the Bregel's.

My daughter has a habit of baking and giving it to her friends too.

See, I have all kinds of excuses for spending money.

I don't even want to see next weeks bill because my son's coming home AND it's Thanksgiving. And when I asked him what he missed most about home, he said, "Good food and my bed". Thanks honey, I miss you too. Just kidding, but it's my fault because I've fed him good food all these years. I take it as a compliment. HA!

This post is a great reminder for me because I keep saying I'm going to stop shopping at the Super Fresh because it's one of the more expensive food stores in town, but it's so darned convenient.

Come to think of it, this doesn't even include my runs to Sam's Club, but I haven't done one in a few weeks.

Yikes!

okay, I've struggled with this all day. How the heck did you come up with the name OYSTER EARS? I just GOTTA know!

Heck, I used to spend $100 to $150 per week on just my teenaged son and me at the grocery store. And that's not counting what I had to buy on the road and such. You're doing pretty well to be holding down the costs for an entire family below $200 per week. Pat yourself on the back, Grrrls! It's not you, it's the freaking cost of living.

Once you've done all that you can with coupons, dollar stores, making from scratch, and so forth, the only other ways to economize are to simplify your life down to the bare bones and cut out any and all luxuries.

Example: I buy almost no canned pastas. Only for emergency food during hurricane season. I cook vast amounts of pasta and store it. You can do this with the sturdier pastas like rigatoni, elbows, penne, and so forth. You can make kid-sized portions of pasta and sauce ahead of time in dollar-store containers, and save a huge amount on those horribly expensive canned pastas and other instant foods. Mostly you are paying for the packaging, and to keep the kids bribed and happy. Food companies know this. They exploit us all massively.

You can economize by cutting out most of the meat in your diet. Don't hit me for saying this. Most of the world's people live on grains, root vegetables, and such. Potatoes, cabbage, carrots, and so forth are very filling and very nutritious. If you don't use a whole lot of fat in your cooking, you are not going to get fat from eating potatoes. If you cook up a stew or a casserole with minimal amounts of meat like ground turkey, sausage, meatballs, etc., and rely on the stew veggies for the bulk of the food, you are saving a bundle and eating healthier than if you make a big slab of meat the focus of the meal.

You may be sparing yourself colon cancer as well, because you are automatically lowering your fat and cholesterol intake when you cut the amount of meat in your diet. Cheese goes very well on such concoctions -- but go easy on the cheese, because it too can contain high amounts of cholesterol. And some cheeses are more expensive perpound than hamburger, or even more than some grades of steak! So buyer beware.

Use chicken or turkey more than beef, since it generally costs less than beef does. It also has less cholesterol. Use cheaper cuts of meat, tenderizing and seasoning well so that the taste and texture do not suffer.

Change your family's snacking habits. A bunch of fruit, if it doesn't go to waste, can be cheaper than a bag of chips. A bag of oranges, for instance, can be less than a bag of chips; plus, oranges are low in sodium, have no fat or cholesterol, and are rich in vitamins, which chips are certainly not. Bananas make terrific snacks and are easier to eat than oranges. Bananas will fill you up. Jello is great stuff! You can use up aging bananas in a pan of jello. You can bring a smile to virtually any child's face with a dish of the stuff. And you can make it in child-sized containers for self-serve snacks or lunches or whatever.

You can do that with yogurt, too. Vanilla yogurt covers a multitude of sins, like aging bananas, aging strawberries, that can of pinapple that's been lurking in the corner of the pantry for a year. A bag of frozen fruit is usually cheap, it thaws really quickly, and kids will enjoy stirring a couple of tablespoons of it into a cup of vanilla yogurt. They will also probably enjoy the conspiratorial feel of making their own secret yogurt concoction. Kids love to learn about how things are made, and they get a lot of self-esteem from making stuff.

Use peanut butter to substitute for the high-fat, high-salt, high-cost lunch meats that we all crave once in a while. Peanut butter is rich in vitamin E, which is good for the nervous system and other body parts. It's high in protein and has no cholesterol. It can go on bread, crackers, fruit, celery, or just a spoon. You can use it on noodles if you make a simple Thai-style peanut sauce. And it doesn't go bad as quickly as cold cuts always do. No waste, no loss.

Teach yourself and your children to drink more water and less soda, sugary juices, and other junk. Water is what your body needs, anyway. It actually helps you lose weight (who doesn'tneed to do that?) and gives you energy, because it helps the kidneys to dotheir work more effectively, and because water is actually a component of the Krebs cycle (forgive my high school chemistry, it's a bit rusty). If you don't have sufficient water inyour system, you will have trouble utilizing the food you eat. It has no calories, no cholesterol, no sugar. If it's filtered, it has no nasty stuff in it either.

If you absolutely HAVE to have flavored drinks, a bottle of lemon juice will make several quarts of lemonade, along with a cup of sugar per quart. OK, that sounds like a lot, but consider how much sugar Coke or Pepsi have per ounce. Plus the lemon juice is good for cooking as well. One of those staples you need to have around anyway. Brewing up a big 2-quart pitcher of iced tea is cheaper and better than purchasing that watered-down crap in the can, trust me. You set it all up and then leave it alone to brew. Easier than opening up a can of soup. If you can boil water, you can make tea. The lemon is good in tea, too. Very refreshing. Full of antioxidants, with or without the lemon. My tea of choice is green tea with a few slices of fresh ginger brewed right into the pot.

OK, that's my 2 cents' worth. I can't remember how much we spend on food every week -- my new roommate isn't anywhere near as frugal as I am -- but hubby and I used to make do quite nicely on about $50 - $70 every other week. And that was with me sending him to work with some kind of lunch almost all the time.

If anyone here would like a copy of my book -- it's only out as an eBook right now -- because they really need to learn how to economize, I would be happy to e-mail it to you. All I would ask in return is to go to the publisher's website and give me a little feedback on what you liked or found useful about the book. Just e-mail me privately and I'll send you the attachment.

Bright Blessings,
Lil

Lil, a perfect post to pitch your book, but you shouldn't be giving it away. Come on girl, you know better than that. Why...you could use the money you make to buy some groceries.

Why don't you tell people again about your book. Some of the women in this forum may not know.

One thing that Lil mentioned that gave me a wake-up call was *no waste, no loss*.

Perfectly worded!

There have been times my garbage disposal is better fed than some people. That's pitiful.

This post is causing me to rethink what I'm spending on groceries and what I'm wasting.

Thanks for the wake up call ladies. I needed it.

Well, shucks, OK, I'll hawk the book again if you insist <giggle>.

Ladies, please go take a look at the sweet little thing at this url:

http://www.catalog.synergebooks.com/customer/product.php?productid=17471cat=&page=1

It's a bargain as-is... $5.00 for the download, which includes a few color pics done by hubby and moi. If you would prefer to order the CDRom of it, it's $3.50 more, I think, but that's just the cost of the pretty refractive disk-thingie. Along with the recipes and money-saving/sanity saving techniques, you also get some pep-talking, encouragement, witty anecdotes, and some poignant stories about my life as a single parent. I have a couple of cool stories behind the recipes. I'm very down-to-earth, and I guarantee you, no Betty Crocker-isms or Martha Stewart-stuff. Andthe cover art is just adorable! Give yourself a present!

But I have to say... if you're really struggling... and feeling lost in the feeding-your-family department... and you absolutely can't afford the book... e-mail me privately. You can pay me back in prayer (and sweet comments on the website! )
Hugs,
Lil

P.S.: Dotsie, I know what you mean about making rich sacrificial offerings to the garbage disposal. That sort of thing breaks my heart. That's why I forced myself to learn what I learned. Heh heh, kicking and screaming the WHOLE way! But it worked.
Love,
Lil

Dotsie, you could give your dog the scraps that are going into your garbage disposal. Just a thought.

Lil, you are a professional!!!!

I spend $130. on average for a family of three (4 yr old) each week and about $250-$300 every two months at Sam's Club. This is not anyhting to brag about but we are average people eating average food spending average time preparing it. Right now I would rather watch paint dry than spend a lot of time cooking meals. This phase will pass-my grandmother said so and she lived to be 102!

Lynn, I know what you mean. Few things are more exhausting than a meal with a whole bunch of procedures and steps and techniques. I only go all-out with anything even remotely complicated for the holidays. I just can't deal with elaborate meals very often.

I'm very much a barbarian at heart when it comes to how I cook. I do a lot of chopping and shredding because I like to use a lot of potatoes and veggies, but if I had me a food processor, my prep time would usually be about 5 minutes for the veggies, which are the bulk of my concoctions. A bunch of chopped stuff, a pound of lowfat sausage or other meat, maybe a couple of crumbled bouillion cubes and /or a can of stewed tomatoes... some appropriate herbs and spices... voila! It's all good. And it all does its thing in the microwave or the oven, while I put my feet up for 20-30 minutes.

You can do the same thing with chicken parts or turkey parts, too.

You can vary the stuff you cook this way according to what you have on hand. No two meals ever have to be exactly alike. And you don't have to be a culinary master to do stuff like this. Just a practical, smart person <patting self on the back>.

Anyway, I hope I haven't bored y'all with all this food and cooking talk. I swear I don't spend all my free time trading recipes... although I found out something really peculiar tonight. Y'all know about numerology? Heh heh.... I found out from this website that my life path number is 6... which is the path of the nurturer, the caregiver, regarded as the most highly domestic of all the life path numbers. I never would have thought that, not before I actually wrote the cookbook and sort of distilled together all my domestic experiences. It's a pretty weird thing to see in myself. Guerilla Tactics... life path 6... who'd uh thunk?

Anyway, I guess I'm rambling again. Sorry to stray so off topic!

Hugs & Blessings,
Lil

My husband does 90% of the grocery shopping and he "thinks" we spend about $150 a month for the two of us. We are mostly (but not totally vegetarian) and don't eat much of anything processed. He's also very good with coupons.

You girls are really funny, I read all of the responses to my question and was laughing outloud to the monitor. Some real good suggestions came through and I appreciate every one of them. I love the line about kicking and screaming all the way to becoming a born domestic godess. If it were not for my wonderful mother in law I would have been throwing that fit as well. How Funny!!! By the bye, Oysterears came from this: When our most precious dog(she is a white lab) has something she shouldn't or if she is really happy she turns her ears inside out so you can see the pink inside and it looks like an oyster. So we call her oyster-ears sometimes.Her real name is Gretchen Louise. Thanks for asking. And thanks for all of the responses. Oysterears!!

Well and thank you OE for the explanation. It about drove me nuts trying to figure it out...I had this mental picture of someone in your family have ears that stuck out really, really far and were pink...anyhoo....glad to know it was just the dog Louise...geezzz Louise!

I mean anybody using the name Oyster Ears has to have a sense of humor, am I right? teehee....

I really do hate putting time and effort into a post and having it rejected <g>. Had a lovely response about gifts in a jar and the server rejected it because of html...whatever *that* is.

So, if you would like my web listings for recipes for gifts in a jar...please e-mail me and I'll send them to you.

TCF, we have to figure out what the deal is with your HTML coments. I've never had that complaint before. I'll email you.

And...please send me your list of gifts/recipes in a jar. I'm game.

Thistle Cove,
I've been enjoying your posts and loved your site. Welcome. I too would like your gifts/recipes in a jar.
My email is crafterscoop@oregoncoast.com
Thanks,
Maggie

I would also love your recipes for gifts in a jar. I love that kind of stuff. Send me a private message through the Forums.