Track what you spend

One of the ways you can control your spending is to keep a spreadsheet on your shopping trips.    You can also just do it with a pencil and notebook.   I use a spreadsheet and keep track by week and store I shopped at.    It gives me a running total so I know how close I am to budget and when I need to reign  in.   I am over budget this week, but I did a big Costco run that isnfoodmthatnwikl last more than a month.    I'll just adjust next weeks accordingly.   It makes more sense than paying as much as 7.00 for a pound of cheese tat I can get for two dollars or 2.35 respectively.    I know the fridge and freezer and pantry are full and I only need dairy and vegetables.  

Keeping a close track of spending goes a long ways to staying on budget and maintaining enough food to feed your family the whole  month.   

I haven't run a price list for a while.  By now, I have prices firmly emplaned on my brain.   I know the RBP of things we use in a regular basis.   I have self imposed limits, on what I buy and pretty much stick to them.   There is almost always an alternative.    We eat, we eat well.  If we are eating inexpensive sources of protein, we are going to eat the best quality I can afford.   

Prices have gone up, but I keep track by looking at the prices of my main things as I shop.  I also read some labels.    Drives hubby crazy.    We don't need that, he'll say!    I know, I'm just checking ingredients.   I want the peanut butter  with the lowest amount of hydrogenated oil.    I'm scratch cooking some things to avoid hydrogenated oils.   Anything BUT canola, Olive amd safflower oil is hydrogenated.   Jenny can cook is  U-tube channel of a gal that bakes without butter for the most part and uses either no oils or a light olive oil.   Many depression area cookbooks use less eggs and milk also.   Butter was a rarity during the war.   Many of them are a help if your doctor has ordered a specialty diet.   

Now some doctors are saying that if you introduce things like peanut butter early on a child's diet, there will be less allergies to it.   I'm thinking maybe when they switched to a no food until six month diet for newborns, it opened up a lot more food allergies.    I never bought into that.   I introduced one thing at a time and waited to see if there was a reaction to it .   The only one that appears to have an allergy is my oldest and that is pineapple.    Just an observation.    I, not making any recommendations.   

I digress.    

Keep track of spending,   It might just be an eye-opener.    

Groceries on the cheap is looking at the Put Dinner On The Table meal train from a different

 prospective.  The emphasis is on purchasing good food( shelf- stable/ freezer staples )at the lowest possible cost and purchasing enough to last you until it goes on sale again -- Keeping a controlled non-perishable stock of the things you use on a regular basis. It means that when you shop, rather than purchasing just what you need for a day or a week, you  buy a loss leader protein, produce you will 

need on sale, a stock item if it's a RBP, and dairy instead.    This allows you to put well balanced meals 

on the table consistently  for a four dollar a day budget per person.   You spend more time on the 

planning and shopping end of the meal train and less on the cooking end by cooking efficiently.    

Four dollars a day is the target amount for people on snap.   My premise is that of you can do it on four dollars a day, spending more isn't hard.   You still get more bang for your buck.