I feed my family of 5 with $375 a month for groceries including food and nonfood items. Most of the times one grandparent lives with us making it a household of 6 people to feed with $375 a month or $93.75 a week. Whether we are a household of 5, 6, or 7 at times, I don’t change my grocery budget. At the moment we are a household of 5.

 

Sales of the week:

Red Grapes at Aldi: $14.94 at $0.79/lb.

Black Grapes at Fresh Thyme: $6.69 at $0.88/lb. We saved $33

Regular shopping:

2 gallons 1% milk at Aldi: $3.94 at $1.97/ gal

16 pc Fried chicken at Hy-Vee: $19.24

We purchased fried chicken we I served in the evening for dinner along with plain rice and leftover homemade pizza sauce. We have not purchased fried chicken for many months and I asked my husband to purchase it out of the food budget although it should have come from the meat budget. After church on Sunday June 23, 2019, the kids, my husband, and I went to our community garden to weed. Then we went shopping. On our way home, we made a stop at Hy-Vee grocery store to purchase fried chicken. We went home and I made pizza sauce while I prebaked my homemade sourdough pizza. We ate the pizza for lunch. As we purchased milk, I drained the milk off the kefir cultures and added fresh milk to the cultures and put the jar back in the fridge. Keeping the cultures in milk in the fridge allows me not to feed them every day. The milk ferments slowly. I sweetened the kefir and served along with the sourdough pizza. My kids loved it and ate a lot of pizza. I served the grapes we purchased for snack few hours later. We have few apples left in the fridge from prior sales as well as 2 bags of red grapes purchased on sale a week or two ago. I used the remaining grapes and some black grapes for our snack. In the evening, we cooked rice and served it with the fried chicken purchased and leftover of the pizza sauce. I rinsed a lot of grapes (red and black) in vinegar water and kept in a big bowl in the fridge for the kids snack during the week.

It is not common to purchase ready to eat food like the fried chicken we purchased. But I don’t mind doing it once in a while since we don’t go to the restaurant. Last time we went to the restaurant was in 2017. We went once that year and have not gone since. We spent $23.18 in food and $21.63 in fruit during our shopping. For the month of June, we spent $143.78 on food and $116.58 on fruit. As you can see, we went over budget in fruit. We saved money from prior month fruit budget which allowed us to go over budget without touching our checking account. Each time I spend less than the budgeted amount in a grocery category, I save the money in an envelope for sales later. Food on the other hand is still below its budget of $200 a month. In overall the total spent in June is $260.36 so far.