How to set a grocery budget?
To set a budget for your groceries, you might first track how much we spent on groceries for the past few months.
Then you set an average budget for your groceries.
If you keep spending over that budget every month, you could be because you set a low budget. Therefore, you could adjust your budget. You continue adjusting it until your grocery expenses fit within your budget.
Our October grocery budget was $300 including $150 for food staples and cleaning supplies, $60 for fruit, and $90 for meat.
How to build your food supply on a budget?
Grocery expenses are a variable expense. You can set a fixed budget for groceries every month. You take cash out for your groceries.
You shop with the cash. If you spend less than the budget, you keep the remaining budget on the side and take the full budget out as cash the following month for your groceries. When a food staple goes on sale, you can use the grocery savings from prior months to stock up.
When you purchase staples that go on sale when they are on sale and stock up, you save money you can use to spend on staples that do not go on sale. Little by little you will have months’ worth of food staples on hand for your cooking and cleaning.
Fruit goes on sale often in the area where we live. We save fruit budget until some fruit we eat is on sale and we stock up fill up the fridge crispers. For instance, my husband purchased Honey crisp apple on sale at the end of September when it was on sale for $0.99/lb. He purchased about 40 Lbs. The store usually sells it for $2.99/lb. By purchasing the same fruit for less, we were able to purchase more. Apple lasts for a while when it is stored in the fridge. The kids eat it as a snack. I use it to make green and fruit salad during summer and fall when our garden is producing salad greens.
Meat goes on sale as well. Chicken meat costs less than pork and beef. When a meat cut is on sale, we use the meat budget to stock up and store our meat in a deep freezer. When we are low in meat, we can purchase chicken quarters or pork meat for our cooking and save some of the meat budget in case meat goes on sale.
How to build your food supply if you do not have a large food pantry?
If you can make a dish from scratch, you just purchase the food ingredients to have on hand.
You don’t need multiple brands of one food staple. You can simplify your dressing and condiments to have in your pantry.
When you purchase raw basic food staples, you can make multiple dishes using few staples. For instance, tomato puree can be used to make pasta sauce, pizza sauce, and sauces for rice. You can just stock up on cans of tomato purée and make these sauces yourself when you want them.
With all-purpose flour and sourdough culture you can make sourdough bread and sourdough pizza. You can make eggroll wrapper for eggroll; you can make biscuits if you have butter. Therefore, you can just stock up on all-purpose unbleached flour.
With milk in the fridge if you eat milk product, kefir culture, olive oil, or apple cider vinegar with the mother, or any vinegar, you can make your own salad dressing. You can use vinegar in your cleaning as well. The milk kefir can be drunk as a probiotic drink when you strain the milk off the cultures and feed them milk you purchased.
By cooking from scratch, you can reduce the number of food staples to have in your pantry making your shopping easier.
How to draft a grocery list?
You can list the different dishes you make often. Then list the different ingredients you need to have on hand to make them. That will be your master grocery list.
From that list every month, you can list staples from that list you are low in and allocate your grocery budget to each category. You can set an amount lower than your budget so that if you forget to purchase a staple or if during the month, you ran out of a staple, you will have some budget left to use to purchase the food staple. Or if a food staple in your pantry goes on sale, you will have some changes left to stock up on it.
Conclusion: How to build your food supply on budget?
Using our October 2022 grocery shopping as an example, we explained how to build your food supply on budget.
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