Man, I'm so behind the times! We moved like 5 weeks ago and I've been in Utah for like 3 weeks, so I guess I have kind of an excuse. :-)
So groceries...we took a hard look at our budgets back around February because we're really trying to save for a house and we just weren't making much of a dent. Our biggest cost was rent (obviously), so we moved to a smaller, cheaper place (that is also much closer to Scott's work). Our next biggest cost was food. We were spending usually around $600 a month on food (holy CRAP!). My mom fed a family of 7 on that much the whole time I was growing up! So we knew we had to make some changes.
Almost half of our food costs came from eating out. It's almost embarrassing for me to admit that, since when I was a kid, my family only ate out like 10 times a year, if that. My parents kind of ingrained it into me that even going to McDonald's was a very special occasion. Maybe that's a little too tight fisted (and my parents certainly aren't like that anymore), but Scott and I really were spending too much money eating out. It's obviously not healthy, either. It's something that progressed over time--when we were first married, we almost never ate out, but lately we'd gotten up to 3 or 4 times a week, sometimes 5 if we ate out for lunch on Saturday when we were running errands.
The problem was that in the years we've been married, our two favorite things to do together are go to movies and eat out. We love eating out because it feels like a special event, and we love to try new kinds of food and get to know the different parts of our city. Eating out in Salt Lake (when we lived there) was my favorite way to experience all the different cultures there. Eating out is a great way for us to relax too, since we don't have to cook or clean up, and Luke loves to watch all the lights and sounds and people in a busy restaurant--meaning we get to actually talk over dinner. Since we couldn't take Luke to movies and we didn't have access to any babysitters, date night automatically meant eating out.
But we looked at it and decided that we could save a lot of money just by being more conscious of what & when & where we were spending it. We set a goal to eat out just 2 meals a week (instead of 4 or 5!), and set a dollar amount that we could spend on those two meals combined (say, $30). That way, if we wanted to go somewhere a little more expensive one night, we would try something new on the dollar menu at Wendy's (or whatever) the other night--or just stay home. It's hard sticking to the budget and we don't always make it, but choosing to limit how frequently we go out has made a huge difference.
The groceries thing too was actually even easier than I thought. We had been spending about $400 a month just on groceries, which really is ridiculous for two adults and a baby who still breastfeeds some. In literally one week I was able to cut it literally in half--from about $90 a week to about $45--by doing just 3 things: I planned economical meals for the week in advance, I made a grocery list for only the ingredients we didn't already have, and I ONLY bought what was on my list at the store. If we "ran out" or I didn't have something I wanted later in the week, I decided I would just have to wait until next week's shopping or I would have to make do with what I had in the pantry. It wasn't nearly as ascetic as it sounds; Scott actually didn't even notice the change in the kinds of meals or groceries we had in the house. He certainly noticed the difference in our checking account, though! Cleaning out the pantry was a good thing, too...I discovered a couple of boxes of pasta and a cake mix that dated back to before we were married (4 1/2 years ago!). Holy cow. We had moved like 6 times and took those boxes each time because I just wasn't thinking consciously enough about using what we had instead of buying more than we needed.
So basically, we decided to stick to a budget and shop consciously, and it cut our food costs nearly in half (about $600/month to about $350/month). We still go over a little sometimes, but nothing like before. It's very exciting to me to have the extra moolah piling up in our savings! I guess the real lesson here though was that we had gotten pretty irresponsible in our spending up to that point. Oops.
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