I sold my husband’s iPhone today as planned.  On the way back from selling it, with $150 cash in hand, I stopped at the supercenter to do my shopping.  I designated $100 for food groceries, and $50 for non-food groceries.

I did a lot better than I expected to with the food, considering I didn’t keep track of the $ as I put stuff in my cart.  I chose the store brand of certain things when I could, but there are still things I can’t bear to go off-brand for.   Like our sour cream, it HAS to be Daisy light.  I have tried Shamrock, and I have tried various store brands.  None compare, I have to have Daisy.

Soda is another thing we don’t go off-brand for, and this hurts with the price of soda sky rocketing (since when is TWO 12 pks for NINE DOLLARS a sale???).  But I try to buy the 24 pk of Diet Dr. Pepper with a $1.50 coupon (which is, incidentally, inside the same 24 pks).  We prefer Diet DP and Cherry Coke Zero, but so far I have only seen Coke Zero in the 24 pks, and I am not too fond of that flavor.  My husband will drink it, but since we will both drink Diet DP, and it is available in 24 pks, that is what I buy.

We also do not like off-brand macaroni & cheese.  We’ve tried various store brands, and they’re just… Blech.  So Kraft it is for those.  We’re not big on Hamburger Helper, but it is going to be one of the things we will start eating now.  So, since I have no experience with off-brands, but I *am* familiar with HH from when my parents prepared it, we will stick with that for now.

I tried to buy store brand Italian sausage, but the shelf for that was empty, so Johnsonville it is.  The rest of the meat I bought – boneless pork chops, stew meat, and 2.25lb of 7% fat hamburger, were all store brand. Even still, those all combined came to nearly $25 by themselves.

I stuck to things that I put on my shopping list, with the exception of one thing I had forgotten to add and remembered just as I was getting in the checkout line, and one I hadn’t added but the Kiddo likes eating so I grabbed a bunch of bananas, too.  All told, the food grocery bill came to just under $85 for six days of dinners.  It would have been more if I didn’t already have a few ingredients in the cupboard already, and this excludes any bread or additional gallons of milk we may need before next Sunday.  I prefer the bread to be fresh, and the days we will have meals where a side of bread will be included are toward the end of the week, so I will just drop by the store to get a loaf the day of that dinner.

Our non-food grocery bill came to about $47.  That had a 37 lb container of cat litter (which was about $12.50), store-brand trash bags, store-brand baggies, Reynold’s brand vacuum freezer bags (for storing the meat in the freezer), a 48 roll package of toilet paper, a thermos for my husband for his morning chocolate milk, and a reusable water bottle for me.

I figure if we can continue with this trend we’ll definitely be saving ourselves a lot of money.  We’ve allotted ourselves one “night out” (or take out) per pay period from one of our now formerly regular restaurants.  Before this we used to spend between $25-$50 almost every night on take out (depending on where we got it, I tried to keep the high end stuff to once a week though), so we were definitely hemorrhaging money by not cooking it ourselves.  Eek!  This is a huge change for us, cooking every night.  But if it saves us money in the long run, that’s the way it’s gotta be.  Maybe it will even get us into trying different dinners other than the few things we used to fix maybe once a week before.  Because I know we’re going to get tired of the same stuff after a couple of weeks, even though we’re having something different every night…

Tags: Cooking, Groceries, iPhone, Shopping List