Our $200 Grocery Budget: 4 Ways Our Family of 4 Saves

Four things that help us keep our grocery spending at just $200 a month for our family of four.  Practical advice that will benefit any budget!

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Money was super tight when we first got married 5 years ago, but we were determined to find a way to get on our feet financially and so we immediately worked at setting up a budget.  

It was during this process that my husband suggested we set our grocery/household budget at something like $100 a month. I balked and declared it impossible to survive off of that meager amount!

I insisted that I truly didn’t mind being frugal but neither did I feel like eating nothing but peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and rice and beans!

And goodness, I was already doing my best to shop smart and even so our grocery bills were somewhere closer to the $200 a month range- and that was just for groceries alone as our household and toiletry supplies came out of a different budget category. There was just no way!  

Obviously, this created some not-so-fun tension with him thinking that we shouldn’t need to spend so much on food and me thinking that I was doing all that I could to shop frugally.

It wasn’t until about a year later when I discovered the world of coupons that I really got into trying to keep our grocery budget low. Suddenly it became a game, a challenge. 

I realized that if I got creative I could probably trim our grocery budget significantly. It took a bit of time and a lot of learning but eventually, we were consistently able to get our grocery spending to $200 a month for our family of four.  

I was now spending less on groceries, toiletries and household items combined than I had been before on groceries alone. Of course, my husband was wowed by the change in our budget (and probably in my attitude too!). And to be honest, I was amazed myself.

Here are a few of the things that I’ve learned that have helped keep our grocery/household/toiletries budget at $200/mo. for a family of four.

Just for reference sake:
* Our family consists of two adults who are pretty big eaters, a 3 ½ yr. old boy with an appetite as big as mine and a 7 mo. old baby girl who at this point is exclusively breastfed.
* This $200 also includes all toiletries, cosmetics, cleaning supplies, diapers/wipes, paper supplies and any sort of item like that.
* Curious just what we eat on a budget like this? Check out my Menu Plan.
*  If you want to see more specifics of what I purchase on this $200 budget, check out my What I Spent & Saved posts.

Our $200 Grocery Budget: 4 Ways Our Family of 4 Saves

1. Choose to do Without

While choosing to do without is not really popular or even always fun, it honestly is probably one of the biggest ways we save.

Some of the ways we do without are:

• My husband takes sandwiches in his lunch almost every day to work. But he has insisted that he doesn’t need both meat and cheese so most days he just has a meat and lettuce sandwich. At first, I felt bad, but he really doesn’t mind and the savings of not buying all that cheese does make a difference.
• Speaking of cheese, we hardly ever eat cheese just by itself. I use it in cooking but we rarely have it just to eat as a side or snack. Do we not like cheese? No, we all love cheese! But it is something we’ve decided to consider a luxury around here to help keep our spending low.
• Orange juice is a splurge item that I get only when I can buy it for $0.99 or less. Again, we all love orange juice but it’s not something we need to have and we can easily eat fruit and get our recommended serving that way much cheaper.
• We don’t buy lots of snack foods. Talk about a fast way to jack up your grocery spending- this is one of them! We don’t eat many snacks and if we do they tend to be more things like raisins, nuts, fruit or homemade cookies, energy bites and granola bars. I still buy chips and crackers sometimes if I can get them for a great price but they are not things that we always have on hand.
• Saving money on meat is a big way to save. One of the things we do is to simply not buy expensive cuts. In fact, I have a maximum buy price of $2.00/lb. for meats (and actually for cheese too) which means that we don’t often eat things like bacon or steaks. But so far we haven’t suffered and I think we still have a great variety!

One of the side benefits of choosing to do without some things is that you learn to appreciate what you do have even more. For instance, because our sandwiches typically consist only of meat and lettuce suddenly a sandwich with meat AND cheese becomes a real treat and we enjoy it immensely. Somehow I think doing without helps us appreciate some of the little things in life more fully.

2. Don’t be Brand Snobs

When I began using coupons I started realizing that I could save a lot if I chose to be open-minded about trying brands that I didn’t typically use. 

You don’t have to be very smart to figure out that if your usual brand of spaghetti sauce typically costs $0.99 on sale but you can get another brand for just $0.50 using a coupon, you are going to save a bundle! I’ll be honest, there are still a couple of products that I am a brand snob about but overall I purchase whatever I can get for the least amount of money.

3.  Cook from Scratch

I grew up in a home where my mom cooked mostly from scratch so I was used to this. And, fortunately, I enjoy cooking and baking. But it was still convenient to buy pre-packaged things to save time. It didn’t take me long to realize that it also was often a quick way to blow money.

Yes, cooking from scratch might take a bit more time but with a bit of planning ahead I’ve learned that it can be relatively fast too. 

One of the things I do that helps save time is to cook up large quantities of ground beef and chicken and then put it in the freezer in smaller portions. That way whenever I need a pound of ground beef or 2 cups of chicken for a recipe, I’m saved the time of having to cook it up. 

I also often make double recipes of a dish and then freeze half of it. Making twice as much of something doesn’t take much longer at all and when I have an unusually busy day it’s so handy to be able to just pull dinner out of my freezer. I also apply this same principle to baked things like bread, rolls, cookies and biscuits.

And, you might be surprised how easy it is to make things like cream soup, Bisquick, Salad Dressing, Shake and Bake and pie crusts from scratch. It’s probably not as hard or time-consuming as you think!

Want to see what kinds of things I cook? Check out my recipes on my blog or on Pinterest.

4. Have a Price List

This might seem a bit silly but it does really help. By keeping track of which stores have the lowest prices on certain items I have been able to save a lot. And it also helps me know when something is a good stock-up price too. Keeping a price list takes a minimal amount of time and effort, but it does pay off. If you want more tips check out my post Save Money by Using a Price List!

Grocery budgets will vary greatly and not all of you will be able to spend only $200/mo. What I do to cut costs might not work for you and what you do I might find to be frustrating. However, I’m convinced that we can all find ways to trim our grocery spending. We’re at the start of a new month. I encourage you to challenge yourself to find ways to trim just $10 from your grocery spending this month. Get creative! Think outside the box.  It just might be easier than you think!

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