OMG!! It’s December ya’ll!! I can’t believe it. At the beginning of November, I made a challenge for myself to only spend $70 per week on groceries for my family of 4 and to not go out to eat at all throughout the month of November. I’m going to recap for you all how the month went. What worked well and what didn’t. I’ll tell you all about my epic failures and my amazing successes.
So $70 per week was my challenge for groceries. Did I meet my budget? There were 5 weeks in November. So that set my monthly grocery budget at a grand total of $350. My total grocery spending for the month was $350.06!! I honestly can’t believe I actually did it. I only went .06 over my budget. And that doesn’t include the cashback I’ll be getting from using my Ibotta app on certain purchases. For the month of November, I earned $11.75 in rebates from Ibotta. While it’s not much, it will add up for doing nothing more than purchasing the items I needed.
Throughout this challenge, a lot of my friends have asked me how I was going to manage to only spend $70 a week, especially with Thanksgiving being thrown in the mix. Planning, planning, planning was the key to my success. Every weekend I would sit down and plan out my meals for the week and go to the store and ONLY buy the items I needed for those meals. Those meals included breakfast, lunch, dinner and 2 snacks per day. I did a whole lot of meal prepping on Sundays to avoid failures during the busy work weeks. And for Thanksgiving, we went to have lunch with my in-laws and I planned to bring side items that would fit within our budget. Below are links to some of the recipes I used.
Barbque Chicken Tenders
Now for my epic failures. Eating out. We started out so strong. We brought leftovers for lunch at the office. Planned ahead so we didn’t eat out on busy nights when the kids had girl scouts and cub scouts. And then our family invited us to Dollywood with free tickets. Dollywood didn’t break us. We didn’t spend any money at Dollywood. But we did eat lunch out before we went to Dollywood and ate dinner out after Dollywood (we were STARVING).
So as you can see, I’ve got a good handle on my grocery habits. But eating out is still a bit of a problem. But hey, baby steps right?! The first step to fixing a problem is recognizing the problem.
So how was your November? I hope everyone had a fantastic Thanksgiving with family!
