Join Nikki for a short episode on Grocery Budgeting; a common topic that comes up in financial discussions. Topics covered in this episode include: general guidelines for how much to spend on food, reducing food waste, and ways to reduce costs.
Resources:
Mr. Money Mustache - Killing Your $1000 Grocery Bill
USDA Cost of Food Chart
How Much Should I Budget for Groceries Each Month?
Budget Friendly Meal Plans
Join Nikki for a short episode on Grocery Budgeting; a common topic that comes up in financial discussions. Topics covered in this episode include: general guidelines for how much to spend on food, reducing food waste, and ways to reduce costs.
Resources:
Mr. Money Mustache - Killing Your $1000 Grocery Bill
USDA Cost of Food Chart
How Much Should I Budget for Groceries Each Month?
Budget Friendly Meal Plans
Welcome to the 3rd Decade podcast. I'm today's host Nikita Wolf. And today we're gonna be talking about grocery budgeting, one of the expenses that pretty much all of us share, and one that can vary a lot, depending on your lifestyle specifically, I'll be touching on some general guidelines for how much you should be spending, reducing food waste and reducing your grocery bill. I'll also provide a few additional resources in description that can help you find what's reasonable for your situation. To start us off a general guideline that you can follow would be to expect spending around 10 to 15% of your take home pay on food. This includes groceries as well as eating out. Specialized diets like dairy free or gluten free are expected to cost more. However, one way to reduce how much this would affect your budget is to buy whole foods rather than specifically dairy free or gluten free processed foods. Another drain on food budgets would be food waste. I have a few different ideas for how you can reduce food waste. One way would be to make smaller, but more frequent trip unless you know, something is of course a staple, then it's fine to stock up on it. For instance, I will literally buy three boxes of protein bars at the beginning of the month at Costco, cuz I know that they have a long shelf life and my husband and I both eat them daily. So it doesn't make sense to go to Costco twice in a month for the same thing. However, I stopped getting my produce at Costco because I couldn't finish it in time. And instead I go to Sprouts weekly to get the produce that I know I'll eat, but in smaller quantities, another way that I've made my dollar stretch is to not force myself to finish a meal. When I go out to eat taking home, half of it in a box can serve as a meal for tomorrow and most of the time, the servings large enough eating half of it actually ends up being filling. A lot of this is just trial and error. Since the pandemic began last year, that was when I really started taking seriously the need to not waste food because there were actual grocery shortages and because I didn't want to be going to the stores frequently. So I got a lot better about freezing things when they were getting close to reaching their expiration such as like bananas or squash broccoli. However, I made sure to be paying attention to the trends of what I didn't finish in time. And then I adjusted accordingly for the future. When I started buying meat in bulk, I realized a really easy way to remove the stress about it potentially going bad was to freeze. Most of it in little individual packs, pretty much as soon as I got home from the grocery store and then take it out incrementally throughout the week or month, some people really benefit from meal planning. And if you do this at the beginning of each month, you can take the stress out of figuring out what to eat and then you'll find yourself well prepared each week. When you go to make your grocery store trip as a side note, it's good to be willing to adjust your meal plan for the week, depending on sales at the grocery store. And this might be made easier by having meals with easily swapped ingredients. If you find yourself wanting to get more into the weeds of it, you can track what you're spending on at the grocery store. This can be a really eye opening experience. You can do this by itemizing your receipts after a grocery trip, just using an Excel spreadsheet and breaking it down into categories like meat, alcohol, dessert, produce, and dairy. And then you can get an idea of where it goes and look at how you may wanna modify it. You'll probably only need to do this for a few months to start noticing your trends. There's a lot of variation in people's diets. So feel no shame, but if you do find yourself living beyond your means, you have other goals that are suffering because of your food spending or you find the food is regularly going to waste, consider adjusting your approach. The last thing I'll touch on today is ways to reduce cost. The first one being to buy in season produce the next is one I found by learning the hard way don't buy everything at the same store. For instance, trader Joe's costs much less for some things, but more for others. So if you start to pay attention to those prices and then choose two or three places to source your food, my happy balance has been to buy most of my produce at sprouts. More of my discretionary spending on snacks happens at trader Joe's and my longer shelf life items and other staples that I eat a lot of consistently I buy from Costco, even though it sounds like I, and more by going to three places, by being selective about what I buy from each of them, I end up saving upwards of a hundred dollars a month by not shopping all at the same store. And lastly, you can get imperfect produce at places like borderlands produce on wheels and market on the move. These are specific to Tucson on. However, a lot of cities have popup like these. You can typically get around 70 pounds of produce for about$12. I hope you found today's episode helpful. If you'd like to make any suggestions to us for topics to cover, please email us at info@3rddecade.org. And if you've been enjoying this podcast, please let us know by leaving a review that's all for today. I hope you're all doing well. And we'll talk to you in a couple of weeks.