Hello ShopAtHome Blog Readers! I’m honored to have the privilege of doing occasional guest posting here over the next few months.

Today, I’m going to share with you some of our family’s secrets to feeding our family on $40 a week. Yes, I really just said $40 per week. And no, we’re not starving or living on Ramen. In fact, we eat quite a healthful and varied diet and only spend $40 per week maximum at the grocery store. (You can see some of our weekly menu plans here.)

But before I dive into the details, let me back up and introduce myself. I’m Crystal Paine, also known as Money Saving Mom, and am married to my wonderful husband Jesse and am mother to three precious little ones.

I’ve always been a frugal zealot, but when my husband and I got married almost seven years ago, my frugality had to be taken to a whole new level as we scrimped to make it through three years of law school without debt. During those years, I learned quite a few new and creative ways to maximize the mileage of what little money we had. And one area I found we could really pinch pennies in was our grocery budget.

Because of the things I learned during our lean law school years, we now are able to feed our family of five on $40 a week. I could write a whole book on how we do it, but in this series, I’ll just share a few simple tips which anyone can use if you want to see significant savings on your grocery bill:

1)      Plan a menu.

If you don’t have a plan, you’re naturally going to spend more money. Taking 15 to 30 minutes each week to write down a menu plan could save you $30 or more per week. That’s like getting paid at least $1-$2 per minute for the time spent planning!

If you’re new to menu-planning, it’s really not as hard as it might seem. You can find some comprehensive articles on the subject here, here, and here.

2)      Plan your menu based upon what you have on hand and what is on sale at the store.

Once you feel comfortable with menu-planning, it’s time to take it up another notch. Save even more money by using your cupboards, refrigerator, pantry, and freezer as the starting point for your weekly meal plan.

If you open up your freezer and see you have chicken and frozen broccoli and you open up your cupboard and see a bag of rice, you have the beginnings of Chicken Broccoli Rice Casserole. Just add cheese and cream of chicken soup to your grocery list and you have everything you need for one dinner that week.

Or maybe you find you have a roast and a bag of potatoes. Buy some carrots and you can make Roast, Potatoes, and Carrots in the crockpot.

One great resource for coming up with recipes based upon what you already have on hand is by using the Ingredient Search feature from AllRecipes. Type in the ingredients you have and those you don’t have, and it will pull up a list of recipes you can make.

Two other websites you can consult for recipes based upon ingredients you have on hand are SuperCook and Recipe Matcher.

Once you feel like you’re getting the hang of planning your menu based upon what you have on hand, I recommend that you start consulting your store’s sale fliers, too. Most grocery store chains have their weekly sale fliers available online. When you’re in the middle of planning your menu and grocery list, quickly browse through these sale fliers and see if there are any exceptional deals on things you need or things you will use in the next few months.

Much of the time, the best deals stores are running will be listed on the front page. However, be aware that just because something is listed in the sales flier it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a great deal. As you become more familiar with grocery store sales, you’ll start to learn when items are at their rock-bottom prices. We’ll talk more about this in Part 2.

To be continued…

Tags: coupons, crystal, groceries, guest blog, money saving mom, shopping

 Print This Post

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 11:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.