*This post was drafted in September but published in January due to an illness and death in my family. Apologies for any confusion on the continuity of this four part series. 

Hi friends! If you’re new here, welcome!

This is the latest addition to a series of blog posts I’ve been writing in which I document and detail the costs of all the groceries I bought that week, as well as the costs of everything I actually use to feed my household of 3 adults. 

Specifically, this is the final week of a full month of tracking my grocery and meal costs. If you’d like to start back at the beginning and read forward to today, here’s a handy dandy link to read Week 1. 

I hope these posts can inspire you on strategies to make your grocery budget go further as well as give you meal ideas if you are stuck on that age old question, “what should we eat for dinner?!”.  

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 =)  

Now for the stuff you’re here for – how much did we spend??

Per usual, my grocery shopping was done at Aldi and Food Lion. Here are the totals I spent at each, the combined total, and the total our meals actually cost for the week. 

So the total amount we spent on groceries at Aldi was $24.85.

The total amount we spent on groceries at Food Lion was $22.48.

The grand grocery total was $47.33.

And the total spent for all of our meals from Friday dinner to the following Thursday Dinner was  $48.54.

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 a few individual lunches and snacks that aren’t leftovers. This is of course an estimate, but it’s based on past tracking of those odds and ends. We don’t typically eat breakfast and most of our lunches do end up being leftovers from dinners.