Ever since my wife and I got married we made it a point to have a monthly budget for our living expenses as a family. We have been successful in staying within the budget for rent, electricity, water and internet, but we always failed with when it comes to our grocery expenses.
There are a lot of tips on how to budget your monthly grocery expenses on the internet: 1] Bring a list with you to the groceries, 2] Buy only the items that you need, 3] Bring exact amount of money you can only spend, and so on. And while these tips are also good, it does not always work for us.
Our monthly budget for groceries is ₱5,000 per month. Whenever we go to the grocery we usually go out with a receipt amounting from ₱8,000 to ₱10,000. Sometimes we even go to the grocery multiple times a month. Obviously, we were going way beyond our food budget.
We kept on saying that we are adults and we will do better next time but obviously we were failing and something really needs to be done.
The initial plan
One day we went through the list of items we bought from the grocery store, and we found out that we were spending our grocery budget not only on what we need but also on what we want. In fact, the bigger cost are in our wants. #FoodIsLife
Our needs usually include bread, milk, meat, canned goods and vegetables. And our wants are potato chips, chocolates, ice cream, and snacks in different forms, tastes and sizes.
We decided that in order for us to be in budget, we needed to charge the needs to our monthly family budget and the wants to our personal allowance.
Continue reading Home Budgeting | How we don’t go over our grocery budget