Lowering Your Grocery Bill (Part 1)

      Scrolling through my Facebook feed, I tend to always pause when I see mention of lowering my grocery bill.  The one that caught my eye this morning was living on $30 a week for groceries.  How can this be done?!  I had to read on.  Then I found my answer… oatmeal for breakfast, peanut butter and jelly for lunch, and I’ll stop there as I can already tell you, I’m not eating their suggested dinner options.  Though it’s a good idea, their $30 a week meals are not to my palette, so next! 

      Hmmm… maybe I should head over to Pinterest.  Pinterest always has helpful suggestions (and not ones that make you pull out your hair because really, just who can do that project!?  Yup, you know the one I’m talking about.  Your personal Pinterest fail you bought all this stuff for, tried… and tried… and tried again, yet it all ended up in the trash, and your vowing to never mention it again.)  So let’s just click on a few more ideas to get us depressed about how we aren’t saving money on groceries, shall we? 

      Oh, look there!  The average family spends over $500 on groceries a month according to the USDA estimates.  (Yikes!  Glad I don’t spend that much.)  And, various blogs suggest:

• Lower your bill with extreme couponing and a massive pantry stockpile.  (Yeah, because we need 96 rolls of toilet paper, and baby diapers for children you plan to have another ten years down the road, and so many jars of mayonnaise there is no way any human can eat it all before it expires.) 
• Become vegetarian because beans are cheaper then meat.  (That won’t fly in this house!  Even Meatless Mondays might be pushing it around here.)
• Avoid buying processed foods.  (Sorry, but can you pass the Velveeta because that just made some awesome queso the other night?  I know, your wagging your finger at me, but sometimes you just have to splurge because a knockoff won’t do it.  It’s like my husband’s grandmother’s chocolate chip cookies.  Don’t try to make them any other way because they just won’t be as good.)
• Shop for bulk at health food stores. (Uh, wherever they live, apparently they have really cheap health food stores nearby because I sure don’t!) 
• Don’t go out to eat at restaurants or eat fast food on the go.  (Sigh.  We were looking forward to not having to do the dishes at least once in the next month.)
• Starve (or at least that’s what it feels like in the end). 

      These are certainly some of the more drastic ideas that are out there.  I know not everyone’s blog post about saving money on the grocery bill reads like this, but they’re the stereotypical common themes I keep seeing post, after post, after post.  I’m not ready to go vegetarian, or give up all processed foods (or that breakfast sandwich from the drive-thru every now and then), but I do want to lower our grocery bill. 

      How this was going to happen was the dilemma that I went through last year, and I am still constantly looking for new ways to lower that bill!  Throughout the next few months I’ll be sharing with you some of the ideas that we employ to help us eat well and watch our wallets.