How did you do on your first week of the Grocery challenge? Planning a menu helped a lot in making sure we use what we have. A menu plan is more like a guideline, I found too. I didn’t end up making each meal on the days I planned for because sometimes life just happens but for the most part I stuck to the plan.
Here’s a recap of my expenses:
$29.02 walmart
$5.12 grocery store for yogurt
$5.99 milk, eggs and bananas
$8.08 McDonalds for Thursday lunch. I ran errands with the kids on Thursday and was out later than I expected.
$9.17 Culvers ($1 Butter burgers on Saturday)
$45 Sushi for dinner on Saturday (it was our 8th wedding anniversary on Wednesday and we waited until Saturday to celebrate)
Total Expenses: $102.38 which is just above the $100 allowance for our family of four
But as you can see, we spent more than half of our allowance eating out. I know a lot of you were concerned about doing the challenge because you were going on vacation or had a birthday during this period. This is what I realized this week: life happens. Sure, some weeks we can spend $50 feeding our families but there will be weeks when vacations, birthdays or anniversaries happen, so you will go over your budget. What matters is to focus on long term results not short term ones.
Having said that, our challenge goes on to Week Two and this week will actually be tougher because: I am going to Blogher 09!! Blogher is only the biggest conference available for women bloggers and thanks to my sponsor Walmart I am going!
This means I am leaving my husband and children on their own for three days. Since the conference is in Chicago, my family is taking advantage of the opportunity to visit friends and family there. What does this mean? Lots of opportunities to spend money eating out. So, I am expecting this to be a week when we go well above our challenge allowance of $100. But for the three days we will be home here’s our menu plan:
Breakfasts
Cereal, Oatmeal, Oatmeal Pancakes and Blueberry muffins
Lunches and Dinners
Monday – Lunch: PB sandwiches and fruit
Dinner: Broccoli Quiche
Tuesday – Lunch: Leftover quiche
Dinner: Spaghetti with meat sauce (already made and in freezer)
Wednesday – Lunch: Leftover pasta
Dinner: I will be alone with the kids so probably something like cereal for me and chicken nuggets for them
I haven’t had a chance to go shopping yet but for the next three weeks we need: apples, grapes and blueberries. We still have OJ from last week and eggs and milk.
If you are following the All You Grocery Challenge with me, how did you do? did you have any setbacks? what successes did you enjoy?
