Adventures in Frugality: Once a Month Shopping

A friend recently told me that, even though she is once-a-month-cooking, she is still spending hundreds of dollars a month at the grocery store. This caused me to do some investigation into the grocery spending in the Langford home.

I was hit in the face with several harsh pieces of reality:

1. My pantry is full of items that are pieces and parts of recipes that were purchased due to poor planning.



2. In reviewing my receipts I noticed that every trip to a store included some sort of impulse purchase.


(We save all of our reciepts in a basket to be reviewed and sorted at the end of the month. Of course, this sometimes piles up and we have a couple of months at a time.)

3. According to Steve and Annette Economides in their book America’s Cheapest Family, 6 of 10 grocery store purchases are unplanned.




4. In the last two weeks, I have darkened the doorway of a grocery store or department store 11 times! That is more than every other day!!

With all of these facts staring me in the face, I decided to take action! After tossing the idea around for a couple of days, I presented it to my husband. I proposed that we challenge ourselves to shop only one day for an entire month. It sounded much more reasonable in my mind than it did when I said it out loud. Now it sounded absolutely crazy but, having verbalized to my husband my preplanned list of pros and cons, I felt in some way committed to the idea.
After talking over some ins and outs for a few minutes we decided to jump off the deep end and give it a try.

For the month of August, we will be blogging all of our prep efforts, plans and lists and countdown to our big shopping day on September 3rd. For the month of September we will be blogging all of the daily issues that pop up, adjustments that need to be made, difficulties and successes as we move toward our next allowed shopping day of October 1st. Our goal is to not set foot in another grocery or department store after that date until the October 1st date. (Even now it sounds insane!)

We will be posting our list of detailed guidelines as we develop them. The ultimate goal of course, is to save money by avoiding the stores, sticking to our budget, planning our meals and eliminating restaurants all together for a month.
You are welcome to jump in on this challenge with us and link up your blog to our regular posts or just read along as we muddle our way through this latest and greatest adventure in frugality!