Eating From The Pantry - Week 4 Update

It's hard to believe that we're almost at the end of May and that we've basically reached the end of the Eating From the Pantry Challenge. During the month of May my goal is to eat more from our pantry and cut my grocery and household spending to $160. At the end of week three I had already spent $230.95 which put me $70.95 over budget.

This week I didn't do as well as I had hoped I would. We wound up spending about $40 at Costco on milk and produce. Then we spent about $10 at the grocery store on soda for a cookout we went to. Sorry I don't have the exact figures, but I can't seem to find the receipts.

So my end result is that I went approximately $120.95 over budget for the month. I obviously didn't do as well as I had hoped to, but since I did spend about $39.05 less then my regular monthly budget I didn't completely fail. My pantry and freezer both still have a ton of food. Since we are selling our home and buying a new one, I really need to work on eating from our stockpile. This is mainly so that we don't have to move it all. Plus it will allow us to save up some money for those unexpected expenses that seem to crop up when you move. So my plan is for us to continue eating from our pantry and I'm going to cut our weekly food budget down to $20. I know that this is a tight budget, but I do feel that it is reasonable when you consider the amount of food in my house. I will continue to post updates on our grocery spending until we get our house sold. Once we're in a new house our challenge will be rebuilding our stockpile, but that is a worry for later. For now I'm going to concentrate on the task at hand - cutting our grocery spending to the bare bones.

Head over to Learning The Frugal Life to see how she is doing with the May Eating From the Pantry Challenge and to find links to the other participants in this challenge. Do you think you're up to the challenge of eating from your pantry this month? If so, join us.