Saving Money on Your Food Bill

Learning to stretch out your budget is a daunting task to say the least. Most people will find that there are 2 major items that they spend more on than anything else, rent or mortgage and food. If you are renting there is not much you can do about lowering the amount you pay for rent other than moving. If you have a mortgage you can always try and lower the payments but every time you refinance you will end up owing more in the long run due to added points or expenses to your loan. That leaves us with food.

Prices for food always seem to be rising due to transportation costs and profit margins. If you are like me you are learning to shop around for the best prices on food. It can be a little hectic when one grocery store has low priced milk and another store has better prices on meat. You can easily waste more money in gas just getting to each store.

Here is what our family is doing to cut back on our large food bill. First you need to get all the family members together and let them know that what is on the table for dinner is all that will be served. No running out at the last minute because "I don't like that" and no snacking either. In fact don't buy any snack foods at all. Snacking will be limited to fresh fruit and vegetables. Without the whole family's cooperation you won't succeed at cutting back. Let's face it most of us need to cut back the calories anyway so we might as well get out of debit at the same time.

Next go through your grocery list and find out what you spend the most on. Is it meat, frozen foods or snacks? At our house it was meat. With that in mind I tried to avoid buying meat but ended up buying more frozen entrée' type foods which ended up being just as expensive. We use to do a lot of hamburger helper meals until hamburger prices became outrageous. I did find that some grocery stores would have specials on larger cuts of meat like London broil at half the price of hamburger per pound. I would buy a London broil and cut it up. One section would be for stew another cut up into very small chunks would be our new hamburger helper meat. I would also buy more whole chickens when they were on sale for .69 cents a pound. I could get a whole chicken for under $3.00. In the mean time I stayed away from the costlier cuts of beef and cut up chicken unless they were on sale. We also learned as a family that cheap meals can also taste good. Here is a list of some of our cheap dinners:

Quick Mex style meal
Burritos - the frozen kind, cooked and topped with salsa
Side of Mexican rice made from the box
1 can of refried beans
Total cost - less than $4.00 for a family of 4-5

Tuna helper meal
1 can tuna
1 box of tuna helper (bought on sale)
1 large bag of frozen vegetables
Total cost - less than $4.00 for a family of 3-4

Hamburger helper meal
1 pound cheap beef cut up
1 box hamburger helper (bought on sale)
4-5 whole potatoes - baked
1 bag frozen vegetable or homemade salad
Total cost - $5-7 for a family of 4-5

You will note that the meal with the beef is the most expensive because of the cost of beef. Also if you want to keep your food costs down eat more potatoes and rice. They both full you up and are low in calories. Bake or boil the potatoes no frying. Frying costs more because cooking oil is getting expensive. French fries are a big favorite at our house bet I buy the large bags of frozen French fries on sale and only bake them no frying.

A word on bread. I buy bread when it is at the $1.50 or less per loaf. I buy more than 1. Bread freezes very well and I freeze the loaves that I am not going to use in the next few days. I do the same thing with hotdog buns and sandwich buns too.

Lastly avoid watching the food channel and other food programming it will only make your task of trying to save on the food bill harder.