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$70 Grocery Budget Challenge (what I bought + our menu for this week)

Now that we’re all moved and settled in, I’m having fun getting back to deal-shopping again! And I decided to go “back to my roots” and challenge myself to see how well we could eat on $70 per week for our family of five.

I’m mostly going to be shopping markdowns and planning our menu around that, plus looking for any really fantastic deals with printable coupons. Since I changed our morning routine (and it’s going SO well!), I now have time in the morning after school drop-off to run by a store for 10 to 15 minutes to look for markdowns.

For some of you, it might feel crazy and ridiculous for me to be going to the store multiple times per week and just doing little shopping trips. For me, it’s a fun hobby that also saves us money!

In addition, I’m not wasting any extra gas or time since it’s right on the way home for me to go to Kroger, CVS, Walgreens, or Target. I’m also hoping to hit Aldi and Dollar Tree every now and then when I’m over in that part of town.

I hit the motherload of deals on Thursday (see photo above), but I’m not including that $48 total in this week’s grocery spending because that was our “big” grocery shopping trip last week.

Since I’m challenging myself to stick with a $70/week grocery budget this week, I’m allotting $10 per day to spend when I look for markdowns and deals. (I can go over, of course, if I find a great deal, but it means that I have to spend less on another day then! So it’s easier if I just shoot to spend less than $10 every day!)

Here are my grocery shopping trip purchases so far: