The Grocery Routine

Many of our resolutions go hand in hand, so we want to establish a routine early on. I'd like to share how we're starting out by detailing a few resolutions:

1. Blogging - we're busy. Sometimes I get home late 2+ nights a week, and so does Shane. Other times, we're both home by 5:45. Most weeks are somewhere in the middle. In order to maintain some consistency and restore balance, we're dedicating Saturday mornings to posting! Even if it's to share a photo of what ever exciting things we might be doing instead :) When we don't have much time on our hands, we'll work on our post throughout the week and publish our final draft on the weekend. And on weeks we feel particularly "unchallenged" at work, you may hear from us more than once.

2. Budgeting - Sometimes, living on a budget sucks. But I would MUCH prefer living on a budget than continuing student loan payments for the next 10-20 years. And that is precisely why we've created a budget to manage/track our spending. Our budget has helped us get on track to be student loan free by summer 2014 enabling us to begin saving up for big, future investments (ie house, retirement, future college students, etc). We have a few main budget categories (each with a number of sub-categories): Income, Monthly Payments, Food, Entertainment, Misc. We started out with basic charts to track our spending, and they've evolved into complicated spreadsheets that probably wouldn't make sense to anyone but us. But that's all that matters!

Initially, I was scared about the thought of starting a budget. I thought it would have to be a very rigid plan and look exactly the same from month to month. But life is dynamic, so a budget should be too. We know which items will (usually) be consistent each month: rent, phone, electric etc, and paychecks. So we started there. At first, we kind of guessed how much we should budget for food (which to us means both groceries and restaurants) and it was trial and error. As we continued to track our spending in that category, it got easier. And we got better at spending within the monthly limits we were now tracking. We also opened a separate, interest-earning account to save up for big ticket items (eg travel and vehicle maintenance) and payments that only occur once/a few times per year (eg car and renter's insurance). Keeping these separate really helps us set better long term goals too.

3. Menu planning - Did I mention that we're busy? Well, it's true. And I really enjoy planning my day around the food I eat, so it's VERY important to me that we plan ahead. We used to be so-so about this, planning last minute or in the middle of the week after we'd finished off the last bits of our weekend leftovers. Not this year!

We decided that planning our menu two weeks at a time (factoring in left over nights) will help us stay on top of our shopping too. We prefer to shop on Sunday afternoons. Sometimes that's just not possible and it's okay! By planning meals in advance, we can look ahead to determine an alternate shopping day. We use our dry-erase calendar, custom made by a good friend as a wedding gift in support of our sustainability efforts, to record our meal plan.



Aside from saving time, our new routine will keep us on track with our budget and prevent wasting too much food that we occasionally forget about. This month, we are attempting to maintain a $300 food budget. I know that number seems small, but we are confident that it's entirely possible, as long as we plan ahead. We rarely eat at restaurants, and when we do we look for deals (groupon now, yelp, and restaurant(dot)com etc). We have some restaurant gift cards from Christmas and are excited to be able to stretch our budget that way too. Interested to know exactly HOW we plan to maintain that budget? Let's start with this past week...

The following were on our menu:

• Broke Bean Stew [Biggest Loser: 6 Weeks to a Healthier You]
• Prosciutto, Spinach, and Pasta Casserole [Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook]
• White Bean Burgers [NYTimes Recipes for Health Series]

We ran through each recipe for a quick inventory of what we already had at home, and made a grocery list of what we didn't. In order to manage our money better, we only brought $40 to Trader Joe's with us - we almost always start our shopping at TJ's when the farmers market isn't an option. To ensure that we didn't go over that total, I kept track of the price of each item we grabbed (rounding up to the nearest quarter) and forced us to decide whether or not we could "splurge" on things that weren't on the list originally (despite the fact that we knew they were things we would need for other meals/snacks). By the time we made it to the line, we were a little worried about having enough after tax (I wasn't sure what grocery tax was), and ended up putting the milk back because we still had some left in the fridge.



We achieved our goal, and only three items on our list were left uncrossed!



When we have things uncrossed, Shane usually does a price check at the Whole Foods near his office, and we usually go that route. Occasionally we'll head to another grocery store instead, or CVS which is a block away. We're excited for Jan 21, because when the farmers market re-opens, we'll start our shopping trip there. We can't wait to share with you! It's usually a highlight of my weekends :)

Do you have a shopping routine? What about a budget? We want to hear what you're doing!