Day One...or is it?

I've been doing my homework over the past few weeks since returning from California identifying and categorizing our spending habits. This meant going through bank statements and credit card statements and creating categories of spending. It was no surprise that food is our biggest tab every month...just as big a our rent paymen and there's only 2 of us. Pretty scary, all that money gone, literally. There's absolutely nothing to show for all the money we have spent on food. I think with dilligence and effort that I can cut our food spending by at least half and hopefully even more as I learn creative ways to stretch the food budget.

I also comb the web, reading up on frugal living, stretching food budgets, de-cluttering, reading articles about simplifying your life and so on. I have come to teh realization during my research that I really lack good ideas on this stuff. For example..."turn stale bread into croutons", I never thought of that. Perhaps its because I haven't been a very inventive cook, it's kind of hard when you eat out all the time. I can cook, don't get me wrong...I'm just not very good at coming up with ideas for food items I already have. We've never done well at eating leftovers, or re-facing them into a new meal all together. I can't really pinpoint why eating out is so appealing, I'm not sure if it's the fact that I don't have to shop, cook, clean or if it's the inventive ways they prepare and plate food. In an effort to make dining at home more attractive I have started outfitting my kitchen with nice equipment and dishes. This is a topic that I will return to some other time.

Today was my first true attempt at frugal shopping. I started out by creating a list and meal planning for the next 4 days. I reviewed all the sales fliers from 6 different grocery chains to see who the lowest prices on the items I needed to pick up. I went so far as to create a spread sheet (geeky/anal I know)and list all the items I wanted. I made a column for each of the 6 fliers and found that there was no store who was generally lower than all the rest. I'm not one for coupon shopping, although maybe I should be, or better yet...maybe one day I will be. I also don't want to go to 4 different stores to get the best prices on everything I buy.

I like to buy my produce from a local farmer's market and I go to the regular grocery store for everything else. While at the grocery store today I really paid attention to prices, sales, store brand vs. name brand items. I noticed that sometimes it's cheaper in the long to spend more, buying in bulk gives you a betder price...but that is not always the case, you have to watch the shelf tags and see what the price per unit is. I see the merits of bulk buying, however with only 2 of us it can lead to a lot of stock in the pantry. I don't want my pantry to feel like I've got enough canned food to last through the next century so this shopping thing is going to be a challenge unless I learn to be more crafty in the kitchen. I also noticed today the price difference in store brands vs. name brands. There is quite a difference there. I have to admit that I am a brand loyal kind of person, so switching to store brands is difficult for me. For items like vegetables I think store brands are fine, but I will have to remain loyal to Coca Cola, Tide and Heinz Ketchup, store brands are just not the same. It is a new challenge for me to find the lowest prices on those items which I am brand loyal on.

One of the ideas I had on making food go farther was to make a pot of soup on Sunday, carry it for lunch or serve it as a first course to dinner a few days during the week. Another idea is to learn what freezes well and put have of it back so that we don't get tired of it and have it go to waste. I do not have good containers for freezing soups, so I had to buy new disposable containers to freeze the soups. This was an impulse buy, I could have paid quadruple what a place like Walmart would have charged but I was there and I needed them. The containers added $12.00 to the food bill and also clutter in my tuperware cabinet) but I have good intentions on using the new containers and implementing my soup plan. I also really need a ladel but I was able to talk myself out of it, $8.99 saved.

When I arrived at the farmer's market I picked up the produce items on my grocery list. I did really well until I hit the checkout line. Right there front and center was a great cookbook publication which featured bulk buying items and how to use ever bit of them, which is right up my alley lately. I am a magazine/book junkie my favorite subjects are cookbooks, digital scrapping, photoshop, and photography. I am a frequent flyer at Barne's and Noble, where I pay annually for their member card to save 10% on my purchases. So to make a long story short, I bought the publication $9.99 over budget, which basically wiped out my savings from talking myself out of the ladel. I need to learn patience, I could have gotten that book a dollar cheaper if I would have waited to get it until we went to B&N, but no...I needed instant gratification. This is now 1 more cook book among a gazillion of them I already own and really don't use. I go to the interent when I want recipes now, and I always forget to start with my cookbooks.

I keep telling myself September 1st will be the real date to start living frugally. The next few days are my break in period, right? So I am not doing very well at this whole Frugal living lifestyle, but at least I took the time to study the items I was purchasing, and I successfully talked myself out of buying 1 item even though 2 others crept on to the list.