Lightening Online

With 1 week left of March I’m just having a look at where I’m up to in regard to grocery spending for the month. I’m trying to keep the spending as low as I can without getting too tight (ie it becoming a stressful thing).

This is where I’m up to so far:

Fruit & Veg $138.56
General $203.53
Treats $ 36.84
Non Food $ 14.93

Total $393.86

Compare this to spending for:

January $441.27
February $398.93

If I can keep it to a similar level of spending as for January I’d be pretty happy (given February is a shorter month so would expect it to be slightly lower). I’ve overspent on treats this month (budget is currently $25 a month). It’s not a huge problem as we didn’t spend all of the budget in February however I will need to keep an eye on this area and make sure we reign it back in again.

If I want to keep March’s grocery spending under $440 I have about $45 to spend next week. Knowing my luck there’ll be heaps of stuff on sale that I want to stock up on and that’ll blow my attempts. LOL. Will have to wait and see. I know I have enough food on hand that I *could* do this. So it’s going to come down to how badly I *want* to make it happen. I didn’t buy any meat this week so I really should buy meat next week so that I’m not keeping the spending down simply by using up what I have on hand. Just having a look through my receipts and so far for March I’ve only bought 15 meals of meat (we use about 5 per week) so it’s a bit down. However, I did buy 28 meals of meat in February which is up a little on what I would have used so I’m not totally eating out of the freezer.

So we’ll see how that goes and I’ll post my results in a week’s time.