How To Create A Grocery Budget That You Can Actually Stick To
My Grocery Budget Tracker-MS Excel-Free Version
Free Grocery Budget Tracker Instruction Booklet PDF
Introduction
How to create a grocery budget you can actually stick to is becoming more challenging in this economy. Keep on top of your grocery spending with this free guide on grocery budgeting including a FREE grocery budget tracker on Excel spreadsheet with pretty instruction manual on PDF included. Both are linked at the top and the bottom of this page.
If you are anything like me and are responsible for the grocery shopping in your household, I will not need to tell you how crazy expensive food has become. What in the own brand is going on?!? It is one thing setting out a grocery budget at the start of the month and it is entirely another thing ending the month having been able to stick to that budget. In this post I will share with you my most successful tips for managing a grocery budget in a cost-of-living crisis.
Most importantly, before we start, download your FREE grocery budget tracker spreadsheet.
The ‘To Do’ List
- Do a Spending Review
- Decide on a Grocery Budget
- Track Your Food Waste
- Cut Out Spending On Junk Food
- Replace Brands for Own Brands
- Create a Meal Plan
- NEVER Shop When You Are Hungry
- Stick to a Shopping List
- Track Your Grocery Spending and continue to review each month. FREE Google Sheets Tracker
- Cook Once, Eat Twice
- Use Your Freezer Like A Savings Account
- Ask Your Family What Meals They Want on the Meal Plan.
- Ban All Drinks Except Water, Milk, Tea, and Coffee.
- Eat Leftovers
- Be Willing To Change Things Up When Things Don’t Work.
Feeding everyone, while keeping to a reasonable grocery budget can be a huge mental drag each month. It is not always appreciated by the other members of the family either. Many of us work outside the home, have children to look after, elderly parents to care for and all the rest. Once you read this article, I HIGHLY recommend that you download the grocery tracker. It is a simple tool that can save you time and headspace. It is completely FREE, so I hope you enjoy it! If you do, please let me know!
1.Do a Spending Review
Review your monthly spending on groceries. Go through your bank statements or banking apps for at least the last 3 months ( 6 months would be better) and see how much you have spent on groceries. I can GUARANTEE you that if you have not been grocery budgeting, you WILL have spent more than you think. This is the first step in successful grocery budgeting and that is, facing the truth. What have you been spending on groceries and what have you been putting in your basket. This is probably a good time to review what you have spent on takeaway food too, as excessive takeaway food expenditure can be a sign of not planning meals and grocery shopping efficiently.
2.Decide on a Grocery Budget
Now that you have reviewed your grocery spending for at least the previous three months, now is time to decide how much you will set your grocery budget as. This is a personal decision, and the amount will depend on where you live. A very rough rule of thumb that has been floating around the blogosphere for years has been £100/ $100 per person per month. That is probably a good starting point to evaluate your new grocery budget from. Run your budget for a month or two and track your receipts. If this rule of thumb is not working for you, then increase or reduce your budget amount accordingly. Don’t forget to download your FREE Grocery Tracker-available in Excel and in Google Sheets, linked here.
3.Track Your Food Waste
An absolute revelation is food waste tracking! There is nothing like taking bags of food from inside your house and putting them into the BIN, to drive home the absolute madness that is food waste. WHY would we bother to track our spending, create a grocery budget, shop for sales and discounts, carefully meal plan and cook for our families only to throw that precious food in the bin. This is a huge problem that we can help to solve in our own homes. Not only will this be good for the environment, but it will certainly be good for pockets to meal plan and buy food with the sole intention of eating it. If you are cooking too much each evening and throwing the food out either cook less OR, pack the food up for tomorrow’s dinner or lunch. Make sure that food is fully cooled before putting it in the fridge.
4.Cut Out Spending On Junk Food
Once you have completed your grocery review, look at how much you have spent on foods that could be deemed unnecessary. While we all enjoy some sweets and treats, are we having them more than is good for us? Reducing the amount of junk food, we eat will be good for our health and our budgets. Be more intentional about ‘treat foods’. When my children were young, I did a no spend year and I would ‘meal plan’ a fakeaway night each weekend. That would include homemade pizza, a sharing bag of crisps and a sharing bag of sweets of chocolate. I would make them each a bowl of treats to have after the delicious homemade pizza. That saved me a fortune while I aimed to reduce my grocery spending.
If you would like to make my no spend year pizza please click here!
5.Replace Brands for Own Brands
How to create a grocery budget when things are so expensive is a question I often notice on social media comments sections. While own brand foods are often much cheaper than their branded counterparts, since the price of food has inflated massively, own brand foods are not the absolute game changer that they used to be. While many seasoned budget bloggers would have sworn by the budget transformational magic of own brands in the past ( me included), let me share a word of caution. The quality of own brand is not as sound as it used to be. Branded foods have been adding and subtracting all sorts of ingredients to make their products more affordable. This is in the context of branded products becoming unaffordable even for those with healthier incomes. This has resulted, in my opinion, in a change in own brand quality too. Own brand started to become more like the price of those mid-range store brands and own brand started to become poor quality.
This is not the case overall and we still but own brand, but I could not replace my whole shop with own brand as I did in my no spend year happily! So, trial and test and use the own brands that work for you. There is absolutely no point in buying food that no one enjoys, that will be a waste of money.
6.Create a Meal Plan
You should always meal plan. Every week or month you should spend time planning your meals out. This does not necessarily include food prep (it can but doesn’t have to) but is about being prepared in advance. Having a fairly good idea of the meals you will prepare and eat in the upcoming week is an absolute GAME CHANGER for your budget. When you are aware of what you have in your fridge, freezer, and cupboards you will be less likely to order a takeaway because you have ‘nothing to eat’ in the house. You know you have food-so cook it and save you cash!
7.NEVER Shop When You Are Hungry
Absolute top tip when it comes to saving money on groceries. If you go grocery shopping while hungry, unless you have the discipline of a monk, you WILL end up buying more than you planned to. Why? Because you will buy snacks to eat on the way home and you will add more to your basket than you had intended to, blowing your budget, and breaking your next MOST IMPORTANT step…writing a list and sticking to it.
8.Stick to a Shopping List
Write a grocery list and stick to it.Not always so easy with those tempting middle aisles in the likes of Lidl! In the beginning you will find that you are adding things to your list because you forget essential items. As you grow more used to grocery shopping with a budget you will become better at creating a complete grocery list. I created an inventory of what we most commonly need to have in the house which you can download for free if you wish. This helps a lot with writing a grocery list and sticking to it hence sticking to my budget.
Free Grocery Inventory sheets.
9.Use your FREE grocery budget tracker spreadsheet every month!
Now that you have downloaded your FREE grocery budget tracker spreadsheet, you will need to use it. Lol, we are all the same. We start with great intentions but don’t always stick to the plan. This spreadsheet is amazingly simple to use. Just enter your intended budget amount for each month in the ‘projected’ section and when you complete a week of grocery spending, enter the total weekly amount in the ‘actual’ section. The monthly tracker sheets numbered 1 to 12 can be renamed so that you can start on whatever month you like. In each of the monthly trackers, just enter each receipt total and the sheet will automatically total up what you have spent for you. As you complete a week you can enter the number into the overview page or if you prefer, you can just go month by month.
10.Cook Once, Eat Twice
This is not only a time saver, but it is a money saver too. It will also drastically reduce food waste for you. If you are motivated by not having to cook every evening for the rest of your days on earth, then this tip is for you. Make a double lot of lasagne and split it into two family sized containers to give yourself a break from cooking on night two. It is a great way to use up those ‘special’ ingredients that we buy for less regular meals.
You know what it’s like, you see an amazing recipe on TikTok, and you go and buy all the things to make the thing. 6 months later, you find yourself throwing out one of those special ingredients because it is gone out of date. Making a batch of that food and eating it over a few days OR freezing portions of it if it is suitable for freezing, could really help to reduce food waste. Reduced food waste equals reduced wasted money and can equal less time cooking and cleaning in the kitchen.
11.Use Your Freezer Like A Savings Account
That sounds like a slightly odd statement, I know. What I mean is this. If you can use something that is on discount such a burger buns or meat and you don’t think you will use it this week, then chuck it in your freezer. If you are anything like me, you will have prepared for the end of days during the pandemic and will have a chest freezer. Mine isn’t massive but it is big enough to stock up on all sorts. Go here to read about how to use your freezer as a ‘savings account’ i.e., save stuff you won’t use now, for the future.Tips like this will help you to create a monthly grocery budget that you can actually stick to.
