My $135 Per Month Grocery Bill

Last week, a reader asked why my grocery bill is so low. I wasn’t sure that it was that low, but after looking at November’s numbers, I realized that my grocery bill is pretty low.

My grocery bill for November was $62.59, and that’s if I incorporate some potluck snacks for the office that I bought, which I filed under discretionary .

Most people’s grocery budgets are around $200-250 for one person.  I’d never considered how low mine is, until I was asked.

In the interest of full disclosure, here are a few ways I keep my grocery bill so low (mainly without thinking about it):

As shown in this picture of my November spending, while I may have spent so little on groceries, I spent $82.70 on food and alcohol aside from eating out.

That actually makes up for a lot of the gap between where my grocery spending is, and where it should be.  That brings my spending up closer to $150, which is much more reasonable. Boyfriend also takes me out once in awhile, so that should be included too, I just don’t know how much he spends.

I should also mention that I don’t eat expensive grocery food. I can eat breakfast for almost a week on $6.  I’ll go into exactly how I do that a bit later in this post.

My weight loss efforts have drastically reduced my tendency to purchase expensive and calorie rich processed foods like chips, candy, granola bars, etc.

My lunches usually consist of leftovers of whatever was eaten or made for dinner. Since restaurant and fast food portions are usually huge, that usually leaves me with more than enough food for lunch if we eat out. For example:

Fresh Slice pizza sells large pizzas for $11. A large pizza is huge, and if I were to eat one to myself, I’d have pizza every day of the week for lunch. If I get Wok Box (which I usually do), it’s usually about two meals for me at $11.

On top of all of this, my boyfriend doesn’t like leftovers. We will buy ingredients for chili, and he will eat it the first night but then the leftovers are all mine. So we split the costs of the food – I’ll buy the tomatoes, onion, and peppers, and he might buy the corn, mushrooms, and garlic – but I end up eating most of it.

Even so, I think that even if I didn’t have my boyfriend, and I just spent money on groceries instead of eating out all the time, I’d still have a low grocery bill. So here’s what I eat to show you why:

Breakfast

1 cup cooked quinoa, 1/8 cup of milk, 1 tbsp brown sugar

Quinoa: I usually buy this from the bulk bins. I get what probably amounts to about a cup and a half dry quinoa, which is usually about $2.50. Quinoa expands when cooked by quite a bit – I’d estimate that it doubles. It’s also super healthy.

So, by that estimate, 1.5 cups of dry quinoa is at least 3 cups of cooked quinoa. This would be about $5.50 per week on the quinoa.

Milk: I don’t buy milk. The boy does, and I don’t use very much at all. In any case, at $4.50/gallon, this is about $0.30/cup, which is about what I use in a week.

Brown Sugar: After doing a ridiculous amount of math just to figure this out, brown sugar is about $0.02 per tablespoon.

Breakfast Total: $5.96/week

Lunch

Leftovers, Salad, Bagel

I am a pretty simple lunch eater. I usually eat leftovers but if I don’t have it, I’ll eat a bagel with a nut butter on it and some honey, or with tomato and avocado. Salads are simple and healthy and I buy the ingredients at the farm market, because I want to support local farms and plus everything tastes better. Not necessarily to save money, though that is a benefit.

Lunch Total: $16.50/week

Snacks

Fruit, veggies

Since starting my weight loss efforts, I snack only on fruits for vegetables.

Last week, I went on a Mandarin orange kick and ate two of them per day on snacks. In the summer, being that I live in blueberry and raspberry country, I pick up flats at the fruit stand for $3 and snack on those all week. For the oranges, they were $6, and lasted for a week and a half. Apples cost about the same if I eat one a day, which I do when I have them.

Snacks Total: $4.20/week

Dinner

Dinner is hard to measure. It’s not the most expensive meal, but I don’t always eat in. Sometimes, I have just a bagel for dinner – at $3.97 for a pack of 6 bagels and $1.50 for generic cream cheese, I’m still looking at less than $5 for this meal for 6 days of the week. I know this isn’t the healthiest choice but it does me well in a pinch. If I do eat bagels for dinner, I then would eat something else so I wouldn’t go hungry.

We often cook quesadillas, pastas, curries, soups, and BBQ. I love Budget Bytes‘ recipes, and I would say we eat recipes that average about $2 per serving, so we are looking at about $28 per week by grocery shopping.

If that was the case, in a four week month, my total grocery budget would be $133.64. 

I should really learn to eat in more often. I could save $20-100 each month depending on how bad my food budget is blown!