I have a love-hate relationship with grocery shopping. Our grocery budget around here the last couple of months has been insane, and by insane I mean almost non-existent..the budget that is. We started off the year pretty good, and around June we crashed and burned. Since then we’ve been flying by the seat of our pants. Running to the grocery store whenever we run out of stuff, usually a couple of times a week..insane right? Well I’m bringing back the grocery list, and I’m actually going to bring it into the store. New rule, if something’s not on the list it doesn’t go in the cart. My goal is to stick to fifty dollars a week, which is perfectly reasonable if I make sure to buy certain things in bulk; when they are on sale.
We usually stick to and shop at three different grocery stores: Safeway, Sobeys and Costco. We should start taking advantage of the 10% Tuesdays at Safeway. In case some of you don’t know, 10% Tuesday is the first Tuesday of the month at Safeway {here in Alberta anyways and I just learnt today that they apparently have the same thing happening at Sobeys too?}. You can either get 10 times the air miles or 10% off your purchase, I’m pretty sure there’s a minimum you have to spend. But I’m sure if you are doing a grocery shop that’s over 35$ you should be fine. I love the savings, and I also like collecting air miles. I collect my air miles points for movie tickets, which is a nice reward (attention date night lovers). I like to shop at Costco they don’t give Air Miles, but sometimes it’s better to buy certain things in bulk like body wash.
I’m still trying to figure out if I want to include our hygiene products {shampoo, body wash, diapers, wipes, etc} in my grocery budget. Or if I should just make a separate budget for those things. Maybe I can try to squeeze it into the grocery budget, and see how it goes. All I know is my purse strings need to tighten until I get some of my debt paid off!
What’s your grocery budget for the week/month? Do you have any favourite places to shop? Do you have any grocery budgeting tips? Do you use coupons?