If My Family Stopped Eating We Would be RICH!

Have you taken a look at your grocery bill lately?  I mean have you really broken down all your monthly expenses to figure out where you are spending the bulk of your money?  Ya, well if you do - be prepared to be shocked. 

How I know this is we did, oh how we did and I swear I will never be the same again.  Just the cost of food alone, it was huge - and I don't even have that big of a family, two adults, two kids and two dogs.  I have less people in my household than most my friends and my family does not even eat that much - us Lentzner's are more grazers and snackers, than big hungry man eaters.  No lobster, no champagne, no fancy french caviar for us common folk.....just basic food - everyday regular food.

I had no idea we spent that much money on groceries, okay wait the truth is, I actually did sort of know how much we were spending but I had been choosing not to add the receipts all up - you know EVERY time we went.  The last time I went to the grocery store and the total came in under $100 I blurted out, "OH ya!" and me and the checker did a little high five.  I mean it came in under a $100!  I knew the bet my husband and I had about spending less than a hundred was going to be won by me, me, ME! 

What I found really frustrating was is in the last year I have only been buying things on sale or the generic brands - I thought I was being frugal.  Yet still we were spending a fortune on food - food!  Not diamonds!  Not fancy cars or vacations - dumb ol' food.  My poor kids were so still hating me after I got them the 10 boxes of macaroni and cheese  for $10.00 ....that was last year and we might have a box in the cupboard.  They even got tired of waffles, we got 60 waffles from Costco for dirt cheap, those babies lasted us all summer!

So after looking at what we were spending on food, takeout and eating out I decided enough was enough.  Eating out - was out, takeout was not happening. We (me) decided to get really cheap on grocery shopping and we would eat what we had in the cupboards, before we went shopping again.  I was going to stop being frugal and start being being cheap.  Cheap is the new frugal don't you know? 

I started by announcing at dinner one night to my unsuspecting family...we would be making some changes.  We would not buy anything until we ate everything in the house - except for emergencies.... then wouldn't you know we had an emergency? We (me) *ahem* ran out of wine and Mommy had to run to the store for some emergency shopping, but that was an emergency I swear - Daddy was out of town.  No really I started watching everything we spent our money on and watching where the money was going.  It is amazing (and depressing) what you can accomplish when you are forced to eat what is in the house (breakfast for dinner, sloppy joes, chicken casserole, grilled cheese and tomato soup).  Who knew hamburger helper was so good without the hamburger (a little Vacation humor there - no it is not that bad over here).  But honestly we have cleared out a lot of stuff that had to be eaten - even if I did not want to eat it. 

Next, I started clipping coupons and I started watching the advertisements that came in the mail.  One store two cities away had some ad that I almost threw away and then I had to take a second look.  For one day and one day only it had a 5 pound bag of potatoes for .98 cents - I was like this must be a mis-print, but kid you not it was real.  They also had 3 yellow onions for .98 cents and Organic Romaine Lettuce (eek organic on sale I know who is not excited?) for like under $2.00.  They also had a special on organic apples for like .98 cents a pound.   So I rushed over there Wednesday morning and I purchased all these things.........total cost $5.21!  I was so loving frugal err cheap - I came home and announced it to my family, so proud, so very, very proud that I hardly spent anything.  It was fun - it was a game and I was winning.  Being the competitive sort this kind of "game" I was good at, for awhile.

I got so crazy competitive I started making lists of what was on sale where and what days.  I made a map and then listed all the stores I would hit.  At one point I tried to figure out what the hell I could do with 4 pounds of swiss chard (I hate swiss chard)that was on sale.  I scanned the other stores ads and they had their 10 for 10 sale.....10 heads of iceberg lettuce, which I considered for like 2 seconds, until I thought of my childhood.  I grew up on iceberg lettuce, as far as I knew as a child that WAS the only lettuce - hell I did not know lettuce came any other way till college.  I hit the salad bar at the dorms and was all, "what is with the weeds?"  Lucky for me my roommate was a bit more sophisticated than me and she pointed out there were many different kinds of lettuce (she was a vegetarian too).  I soon found out I could even drench it in Ranch Dressing (the staple of Dorm Food) and then it all pretty much tasted just fine.  She also took me out when I turned 21 and held my hair back when I.......oh wait that is another story.  Anyways, at least the iceberg lasts a long time - I had a head of it that we used for 2 weeks, the other stuff (dark green stuff I now love) went bad in 3 days - I can not be frugal AND healthy in just 3 days!

Looking over the ads I almost bought into the 10 cans of beans for $10.00 but realized I could not go that far.  My family's intestines could not handle that kind of abuse nor could our air quality handle that - or could we eat beans?  I read that bean sales went up 20% this year due to the down Economy.  And then I started to do the math for the extra toilet paper consumption and decided against it.  My family will thank me later I am sure of that.

Free range chickens were on sale but I could not figure out if it was a good deal or not.  I had lived off chicken for most of my teenage years - and the scars were still raw.  I blame my parents for this since as a young child we only ate red meat all the time and then turkey twice a year, Thanksgiving & Christmas.  No fish, no chicken....maybe we splurge on pork chops and apple sauce - but that was it!  But, then in the late '80's came the Price Club/Costco and behold my mother found the......BAGS OF BONELESS CHICKEN - Hallelujah we ate that every day till I went away to college.  My Mom was all Forrest Gump with the chicken, "We had chicken fajitas, chicken and rice, chicken casserole, chicken and potatoes, chicken and dumplings, barbecued chicken, baked chicken, fried chicken, chicken salad..." I am not trying to be funny either - we ate a lot of chicken.  I am not sure I can make my family endure that kind of torture.  In my mother's defense she grew up on 7 meals, I mean really her Mom made the same 7 meals week after week - no change, she made the same food.  So we could get some chicken every once in awhile - but I was creeped out by having it every day.

So after an hour pouring over the ads and the whole adventure I realized that this frugal thing was a lot of work - and I had a job, I could not drive all over the better Bay Area to get cheap food.  I did not have time for this and it was exhausting, boring.  I decided we would take baby steps but still watch our grocery bill.  I wanted to just go shopping and not worry about the cost of everything - but those days were over.  I started using allrecipes.com, I asked friends for recipes, I got creative with what we had.  I figured more chicken, a few heads of iceberg lettuce and some (gulp) cans of beans would not kill us.  Maybe I'll even give up the wine, or switch to box wine....I said MAYBE!

Original post at SV Moms, Jamie can also be found discussing the cost of things like tile and ribbon at JPDMom.