Hi friends! If this is your first time here, welcome!
This is the latest addition to a series of blog posts I’ve been writing in which I document and share my grocery haul for the week, the meals I made that week, and how much everything cost to feed my household of 3 adults.
Specifically, this is week 2 of a solid month that I am documenting. If you’d like a quick link to read week 1 first, HERE YA GO.
If you are stuck trying to figure out “What’s for dinner?” or looking for ideas to stretch your grocery budget further, I hope you can find something within this blog that either helps or inspires you!
As for some disclaimers:
- We all have different dietary needs.
- We all have different preferences.
- We all have access to different food sources.
- We all have different ideas of what a healthy diet looks like.
If you just looked at this short list of disclaimers and you are still saying, “Yeah, but…” then I encourage you to have a look at my original post where I talk in a little more detail about the hows and whys of my personal meal budgeting and planning – the most important word in that sentence being “personal”. There is no rule book to any of this after all, so take what fits into place for your life and feel free to leave the rest behind =)
On to the food and totals!
I’m going to give you 2 different cost totals. The first being what we actually spent on our grocery shopping for the week. The second number is going to be the cost per meal, including everything down to oils and spices. I watch a lot of videos and read a lot of blogs about budget groceries and meal plans, and I know I always feel like it’s a little disingenuous when the content creator makes a claim of feeding their family on an impressive budget, but then they are pulling items left and right from their pantry and freezer and not including those items into the actual cost of feeding their family.
If I paid for it, it gets counted in my total!
So the total amount we spent on groceries at Aldi was $26.23.
The total amount we spent on groceries at Food Lion was $30.13.
The grand grocery total was $56.36.
And the total spent for all of our meals from Wednesday dinner to the following Wednesday lunch was $45.98.
I’ve also tacked on an extra $5 to account for the extra odds and ends that I don’t strictly track, like coffee and creamer, and individual lunches and snacks that aren’t leftovers. I have tracked this in the past, so $5 is a fair enough estimate. We aren’t a breakfast eating bunch and most of our lunches are typically comprised of leftovers. I do separate lunches that I make for the house from this $5 as you’ll see further down.