Join the Club.. Thrifty Thursdays

So, several of my online heroes are sharing their budgets and shopping rituals. I LOVE the idea because no matter how careful I am, I can always learn more. So, visit Jenny, who is feeding eight on a budget of $150 a week (or $600 a month). I'll add more people as they start, I'm hoping that it'll become a trend.

One of the ways we save money is by shopping once a month, and always preparing a menu for the month. It seems crazy, I know, to have it set down what we'll eat in three weeks, but we're not tied to it. What it means is that we've bought what we need to make 30 meals, and we can switch them around according to desire. We have written down all of our outings, so we can plan easy meals on days we'll be gone, or even take out for special occasions. For example, we know that we'll have a babysitter on August 11th, so we have "Raisin' Canes", one of our fav chicken restaurants, written down. We can buy the tailgate meal for $25, which is half of our extra for the week, but so worth it because the quality (and that we can ask for our chicken 'naked' meaning no crusty allergens)

Today was payday. Our general idea is that we do big shopping on payday, stock up, for $400. Then we try to spend less than $50 the following three weeks to buy fresh milk, bread, eggs. I am TRYING to convince my husband that if we run out of some herb or condiment that we technically could survive until the following payday. This is important because he can not just run into the grocery and buy the one or two things we're out of, he'll stock up on Oreo's and gumballs and whatever unnecessary items we don't need. Today was $430, but I've been sick and I bought some convenience foods, like prepared chicken nuggets. We didn't stock up on meat, just bought a few extras from our food calendar. We also did not need to stock up on flour, sugar or rice, since we still had 15 to 20 pounds of each from last month.