Checking in as it is nearing the end of the month.
I tallied our expenses and we are currently at $425$475 on groceries + eating out. We have enough food to get through the weekend, so this should be it for the month but we went grocery shopping on Saturday anyway, oops....I say it was worth it as we picked up about 15 lbs of apples (honeycrisp/fuji/granny smiths) for $4.50! This is more than we were hoping for, but....less than our average for last year. The main improvement is that we spent $0 on eating out (I thought my husband had gone to breakfast with a friend once, but it turned out they decided to skip it and just go running instead). We did also tweak our meal plans several times so as to postpone a grocery trip by several days or even a full week (but apparently not during the last week of the month), which I'm sure helped to reduce food waste and prevent impulse buys! Overall I feel like we ate really well--we made an effort to try out a new (cheap) recipe each week to prevent boredom, which was fun. Several will be going into our regular rotation (spicy curried spaghetti squash, yum).
This month did include a few "stockups" that we had initially planned to postpone until February (bulk jars of olive oil, nuts, coconut milk, tuna, crazy on sale frozen veggies, etc.), which is why we had such a high total. We still have a little pre-baby stocking up to do so it may be tricky to keep February spending low, but it is a short month and hey, we do have *most* of the stocking up out of the way.
I did some tracking of food purchased for "now" vs. food purchased for "later", and our "now" food purchases (things that we ate or mostly ate this month) were about $150, so I'm hopeful that we can have a few low months in March/April/May/June (when the plan is to live off the stockpiled foods and only purchase fresh produce and eggs) to balance things out. I did not track "now" food vs "stockup" purchases last year so I'm not sure if $150/mo is a significant reduction or not, but I'm going to keep a closer eye on this going forwards, just for kicks. I did look at our spending from places where we don't purchase anything except fresh produce, and our spending at those places alone was a little over $110/month, and we do also fairly consistently go through about $25/mo in eggs, maybe $10/mo on dairy products, and then will pick up produce at the other stores we frequent if it's a good price (so maybe $5-$10/week or $20-50/month?)...I'm going to say that $150 month is at least in the same ballpark as our previous basic spending on food to be eaten within the month of purchase, perhaps even a slight reduction. Given that we also had no meals out and I had only a few days of work travel, I'd say this is a good sign of progress!
