Food Budget Leaks Like Sieve
October 21, 2008 – 2:39 pmYep, food price woes are reaching even me. You may recall my earlier post about hubs and I (mostly me, as I do most of the grocery shopping) implementing a strict $60 per week food budget. After we got home from Spain our cupboards were completely empty, so it took a couple of weeks worth to get ourselves stocked up adequately. I haven’t been able to recover since.
I’m trying to gauge if I need to increase our weekly allowance, or if I’m actually purchasing too liberally. Now, granted, we have had folks over for dinner several times, which costs a bit extra (for instance, a bottle of wine and some sorbet). But I really haven’t bought that much out of the ordinary.
At this point, our October budget is completely blown. As in, I have some change left in the envelope. We did this on purpose, sort of, by going to the discount Amish grocery in a nearby town and stocking up on a winter’s worth of dry beans, popcorn, spices, flour, some nuts, and a couple of Amish canned goods: totaling $61.45. If we can’t get through the rest of the month on that and what vegetables I have in the fridge and left in the garden, then we are ridiculous and spoiled.
But it doesn’t change the fact that if we were truly poor, and had nothing to fall back on after our $60/week ran out, we would be having a very hard time indeed. So, a) I’m grateful not to be truly poor (like, we can occasionally go out for an extra-budget meal or beer or coffee), and b)I’m grateful that this is the extent of how the nation’s economic woes are reaching us (aside from the roth IRAs and my 401k that we are purposely not looking at) — so far neither our jobs nor our income have taken a hit, and gas prices are (for now) on the decline. We’ll see how long this lasts.