Grocery day

Yay today was grocery day. Sad how when you give up shopping getting the groceries is considered a shopping outing. My budget for this supermarket was $80 and I managed to scrape in $4.38 under budget. I have $34.38 to spend now at supermarket number 2. And I must remember to get chocolate.

I always take a list with me when I go shopping. And this list is divided into 3 categories. Firstly there are the things I must get no matter if they are on special or not. This is usually made up of fruit & veges, milk, bread, chocolate and anything I have run out of or am almost out of. Secondly there's the things I would like to get but only if they are on special. Usually baking ingredients, juice, ice-cream. Thirdly there's the stockpile stuff. Usually this has 2 focus areas currently breakfast items and cleaning products. Working on this weeks catalogues there's not a lot of cleaning products that are on great specials so I've really focused on breakfast stuff. Next week I might change breakfast stuff to baking stuff and so on until my stockpile is looking really healthy again.

The advantage to stockpiling is that I very rarely run out of non perishable goods. That way I rarely pay full price instead waiting for a good special and then grabbing as many as I can afford. This is great for keeping the grocery bill inline with the budgeted $80/week. One thing I have learned about stockpiling though is only stock up on the things you eat the most. It's great for us to have a lot of breakfast items for example but not a lot of biscuits and chippies. When we have lots of that sort of stuff we just eat it for the sake of eating it which is not the way to save money. And my baking tastes a lot better than that junk anyway.