The single biggest expense in our monthly budget is food. In addition to the $600 each month, we also enjoy eating out. This year we have spent as much as $400 in one month eating out with an average of $200 a month spent on food to go. I usually have coupons so I can’t imagine what this would be if we eat “like normal”.\u00a0\u00a0 I attempted to plan on the next several months being really expensive with pool season, the beginning of cheerleading and several birthdays as well as our schedule vacation. After some thought and discussion, we decided to try to eliminate all eating out for the month of May.\u00a0 So far we have been successful, we did order pizza the night after our yard sale but used profits to pay for it.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, of this past week, Sonic had\u00a0 a super deal of corn dogs (50 cent each) so I decided to be really creative.\u00a0 We have a change bucket that Matt throws his spare change and I will sometime empty mine in to as well. For the yard sale, I took the change container with some change in it, I added to and use it for change all day but did not bother to count it up at the end because I had not counted it at the beginning. So on Thursday, I raided the change and was able to purchase a dozen corndogs and left at least another dollar!<\/p>\n
Another way that we have attempted to save money is by making our own bread.\u00a0 I have been doing this since the bread class I taught about in this post<\/a>. So far I do think it has saved up money, I purchased a large bag of bread flour for $14.95 and several boxes of instant potatoes for less than $5.\u00a0 We have gone 2 months without purchasing bread so we are at the break even point now. I plan to continue with this\u00a0 because it is not as difficulty as I thought, much healthier and cheaper!<\/p>\n Finally several other ways we save money on food\/groceries is couponing, buying in bulk and attempting not to waste anything. I mentioned in April that we were starting to run low on choices for meats, basically we had chicken and deer meat. I am very excited to report that we have not purchased any meat yet! We are continuing to eat the meat we have in creative ways!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The single biggest expense in our monthly budget is food. In addition to the $600 each month, we also enjoy eating out. This year we have spent as much as $400 in one month eating out with an average of … Continue reading