I used to meal plan around the ads and price match at Walmart.

Decide what makes sense for you in your current season. If you want to coupon, spend time meal planning around the ads, price match or go to a few stores for great deals, then you will be able to save more money. How much time do you want to spend on grocery shopping and meal planning? If you’re calculating a grocery budget for 2, you will spend less than a family of 8. My grocery budget will likely be less than someone who has a few teenagers at home. Now that we have 4 kids ages 1-6, and we feed a lot of extra people each week, our monthly grocery budget is $900. When I had 3 kids under 4, our monthly grocery budget was $600. If your husband goes on a diet that requires you to buy twice the amount of meat you usually buy and $50 worth of protein shake powder and specialty protein bars, then your grocery budget should increase. But what’s included in your grocery budget should determine your overall number. Remember, there’s no wrong way to do this. We use YNAB, so it’s easy to track spending & receipt purchases. I do diapers and household categories separately because it’s easier for my brain to categorize that way. What items are in your grocery budget?ĭo you include household items and pet products or are those separate categories? I’ve done this differently over the years.Ĭurrently I have a food budget that includes eating out, having people over, my husband’s diet protein shake powder & snack bars, formula, and baby food. So, our grocery budget reflects the combination of income, financial priorities, and lifestyle priorities. But, we also choose to snack on fruits and vegetables (instead of cheaper junk food), eat meat at most dinners, and invite people over for meals a couple times a month. We have chosen to be quite frugal in some grocery choices so that we can save more money towards our down-payment goal and so we can get out of student debt faster. Food + Shelter should be first in your budgeting priorities.īut, think about what grocery bill you can afford as it relates to your other financial priorities too. A good rule of thumb is not exceeding 10-15% of your take-home pay on food. The most basic rule of personal finance is don’t spend money you don’t have. (It might help to write down your answers.) 1. To figure out your ideal monthly grocery budget, ask yourself the following questions.

Remember, there’s no right answer to this! But I want to help you figure out a good amount for your unique situation. There’s no grocery budget competition.Īny amount you choose that you can afford and that takes care of your family’s needs is the right amount. Just because there’s a blog post about someone’s $20 organic grocery budget, it doesn’t mean that has to be your budget too. Sigh a deep breath of relief & let yourself off the hook! In that case, cut up the card and head over to my survival budgeting guide.) Otherwise, there is so much freedom in your grocery budget! (Well, unless you are buying groceries on a credit card you can’t afford to pay off. Instead, you need to figure out what your family’s grocery budget should be. It’s silly to try to figure out some magic grocery budget number because there is no trick or magic grocery budget number that everyone should strive for. You have to do what works for your family in your current season.Īnd that is what I’m going to help you figure out. Everything from price matching at Walmart (my walmart stopped price matching) to shopping at Aldi to meal planning monthly.īasically, I’ve spent the last couple years trying to come up with the perfect grocery budgeting system and strategy and it dawned on me recently… THERE IS NO ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL PERFECT SYSTEM. In the last couple years that we’ve been paying off our student loan debt with a vengeance, I have had a few different systems for keeping the grocery budget low. In fact, one of the most frequently asked questions I get is, “how much do you spend on groceries?” or “What should your grocery bill be?” I hear people bemoaning the darn grocery budget all the time! It’s so hard to know how much groceries “should” be costing. See my entire disclosure policy for all the boring details. When you make a purchase through an affiliate link, I earn a commission at no cost to you. Some of the links on this page are affiliate links.

Family of 5 average grocery bill