February Challenge

Dan and I have decided to undergo a "fun" challenge for the month of February. We've decided to cut our food budget for the month in half. For each week in February, we will only have $60 to spend on groceries.

The reason? We have a TON of food in the freezer that needs to be eaten. Leftovers from previous meals, as well as enough food to feed a small army. Our cupboards are full of canned goods that we should use up.

Basically, I realized that I'm a food hoarder. Perhaps it has something to do with buying in bulk. Or maybe my mom's mantra to always be prepared. But regardless, we have enough food in the house to probably make it the entire month without buying anything. But we decided to have a few dollars to buy things like milk and veggies that won't last the entire month.

So why did we decide to limit ourselves to $60? I originally wanted to have a challenge to only buy from the outskirts from the store (aka produce, meat and dairy). But I found that to be somewhat overwhelming. I could picture myself justifying buying this or that...and I found the need to have that one item from the center of the store too tempting. Plus, if you are going to make a meal and need coconut milk or beans do I really have to change my meal plan based on that? And what would I do if we ran out of shampoo or diapers? Oil or peanut butter? So we decided to set a budget instead. Fifty dollars a week was the original plan, but removing that from the bank machine is a hassle, since we plan on using only cash. So sixty was agreed upon. It also happens to be about half of our food budget per week.

We are looking forward to the challenge but are realizing that it might be harder than we thought. We just realized that we are out of olive oil and that's a big budget item. So there is this pull between purchasing the large size like we normally do to save money in the long run verses the small bottle to "get us through" the month. It shall be interesting to see what happens!