I live in a VHCOL rural/resort area (nearest big city is SF Bay Area. Wildly, it’s cheaper for me to shop there). My household is 4–5 people, depending on whether my college kid is home.
Here’s how our grocery bill has ballooned over the past few years (including toiletries, laundry soap, remedies, etc.):
2020: $50/week
2021: $100/week
2024: $200/week
We did make health-related changes that increased costs (more produce, better quality food, “clean” toiletries, etc.), but this year the bill started rising without any changes on our end. By May/June we were spending $400/week.
I finally sat down and tracked the last 5 weeks: $650 on groceries + $200 eating out = <$200/week for 5 people (college kid home). FINALLY trending in the right direction!
What helped so far:
Planning/prepping “fast food” at home for busy nights
Growing herbs + green onions on the windowsill
Foraging for berries/fruit
Making my own dressings, marinades, condiments
(Tried gardening, but deer destroyed most of it – got only a few zucchini 😩)
We already cooked nearly everything from scratch, ate vegetarian (beans and rice!) half the time, baked sourdough, and packed lunches, so the usual frugal advice is and has been already in play.
But groceries just keep climbing (today everything was $1+ more than last trip). I want to push our bill down even further.
What are your most extreme frugal food/household hacks? Even the “crazy” ones—please share, because what doesn’t work for one person might be gold for someone else.
Groceries are out of control – finally making progress, but need your extreme frugal tips
byu/kidscatsandflannel inFrugal
Posted by kidscatsandflannel
16 Comments
I think $50/wk per person is a perfectly reasonable food budget. So $200/wk for 5 people is great.
Napa is expensive.
Grow sprouts in mason jars with mesh over the top, from dry seeds and beans (alfalfa, clover, lentils, soy, broccoli, radish, etc etc). Use instead of lettuce in salads and on sandwiches. Once you get into the groove of how much you need and how long they take to grow (not long!) then almost none go to waste. Also the deer can’t find them to eat them in your kitchen! Hopefully.
What do you buy for groceries? And where do you shop at? These are important too. I cut all juice from my spending, and just buy powdered juice mix, saves so much money for example. Stop eating out of course.
It’s not out of control. Gas prices are at $2 a gallon. Some place even lower than $2 according the orange clown in a diaper.
Good luck. We just stopped into a local (Long Island, NY) Walmart supermarket. Regular (small) red plums were priced at $1.32 EACH. Not a pound, EACH. Peaches were also $1.32 each. Walmart. Not Whole Foods.
My only guess is that this is the result of ICE raiding the farmer’s workers. Nobody to harvest = higher prices for what doesn’t rot in the field and does make it to market.
I don’t know what to say other than keep an eye out for sales, bargains and the clearance corners.
We have had a chest freezer for years to store things we got on sale or that we buy a lot of but doesn’t keep long enough to use up before it turns. The items are stored in smallish cardboard boxes which allow use to search or get to the bottom easily. A basic directory on a Word document helps & gets updated periodically. Proper wrapping helps to preserve against freezer burn. My mother-in-law showed me that if you take meat and wrap it so that the foil touches the meat, then place it in a freezer bag with the cut-off label, that the meat won’t get freezer burn. Only those small parts that the air can get to will get freezer burn.
Some types of food go on sale seasonally. For example, butter goes on sale close to Thanksgiving, Christmas and the spring holidays. I buy it then, write the month & year on the barcode w. a sharpie, freeze 5 at a time in a gallon freezer bag. I always use the oldest butter first. Corned beef goes on sale before St. Pat’s Day. The bags are so tough that I just put it in the freezer as is. We have it a few times during the year and make Reuben sandwiches with the cold sliced meat (I’ve never had luck making hash with it.)
Refrigerator pickles are rediculously easy and super cheap to make. Mine are ready in 24 hours. There are recipes online for new pickles, sour pickles, bread and butter pickles, etc. I’ve also made the big salt fermented (barrel) pickles too. Get your spices from a South Asian (Indian) market. They are cheaper and very fresh.
Sauerkraut: save one leaf & shred heavy-for-it’s size cabbage, weigh the shreds (in grams because it’s easier to calculate the salt needed) and multiply that number by .02 to arrive at the correct amount of non-iodized salt to use. Toss the salt & cabbage together & cram it into a glass or plastic container (I never tried it with steel). The cabbage will weep water. There should be enough to cover the shreds, if not 1 tsp salt in 1 C of water will make extra brine. Place the cabbage leaf on top and a clean weight or a small plastic bag of brine to hold the shreds under the brine. Loosely cover, place in a bowl in case it overflows (tiny bubbles will form as it ferments & can cause a rise of liquid) & set it aside at room temp for 3 weeks. The longer it sits, the more complex the flavor which is superior to supermarket sauerkraut. Store in the fridge when ready to slow further fermentation. Cabbage was on sale here for $.50 per lb. A pound of kraut at the market is $2.69 – $3.89 here. It doesn’t make sense to not make it and home made kraut is healthy for your digestion.
Use the kraut for kielbasa recipes, hot dogs, Reuben sandwhiches, soup, etc. A teaspoon of sauerkraut juice speeds up canker sore healing (there’s something in the cabbage juice that helps kill the bacteria).
Lastly, make your own tomato sauce: A little olive oil in a pan to lightly sautee a generous amount of minced garlic (that you can grow too. Stick large single cloves 2-3″ in the soil in the fall, push some leaves or grass clippings over and harvest inthe late spring. The new garlic needs to dry out for a few weeks but you can use it right away) & add some large cans of crushed tomatoes. Salt & pepper to taste. Simmer & done. You can elaborate on the basic recipe, but you control the sugar and save $$.
You can see that I’m angry too, at the cost of food!
It may sound old-fashioned but couponing should help.
I signed up for all the local grocery stores once a week emails and prioritize shopping. What’s on sale and building my weekly meal plans on top of that.
Substitute ground pork for ground beef in a lot of recipes or at least half and half.
If you have the freezer or storage capacity bulk buy when something’s on a really good special
Don’t buy sodas and juices. Cut back on your snack and sugar intake. A lot of that is empty calories and wasted money.
I found that when I do go out to eat if I skip the appetizers order a sensible whatever off the menu maybe something you can have leftovers of and drink water instead of anything else. Then my restaurant Bill got cut in half
Rice is one of your best friends for cheap meals. Buy dry beans instead of canned for a much better price. Pasta is also a cheap and filling.
I get frozen veggies instead of fresh even though it cost a little more. I don’t throw any away because they went bad
r/dumpsterdiving
one great tip is only buy meat & cheese on sale then freeze, for example if local store has ground beef on sale this week buy and freeze some , then next week store might have chicken breasts or thighs on sale, buy and freeze, week 3 maybe ham or Turkey on sale, buy and freeze, then you’re meal prepping out of your freezer and not buying regular price. it takes a few sale weeks to build up stock but stores usually repeat meat sales by week so you’ll begin to see the pattern, like I know locally if my store has ground beef this week, next week it’s going to be a good sale on chicken thighs.
same with cheese, stores cycle through different types each week, so 1 week cheddar , next might be Swiss, then Colby jack, rinse and repeat. cheese freezes pretty well but the texture will change a bit, totally fine for cooking but eating cold the texture may need to be camouflaged a little by condiments on a sandwich etc.
also, stretch meat & cheese in dishes with tofu or mushrooms whatever are cheaper in your area.
If you can expand bread that’s great. My partner bakes and makes all bread pizza etc. We also make our own yogurt.
Given all the homemade stuff Costco might be worth it to you. We get flour olive oil and things like that there. With 5 people it should be pretty easy to use bulk items.
For us (household of 2), we are trying to lose a bit of weight so we’re reducing portion sizes and stretching our meals out. Eg what we used to cook as 2 portions becomes 3 portions.
We buy stuff on sale whenever possible. Almost every grocery store has regular sales going on, we always start there and pick some vegetables or protein that’s on sale. Then figure out a meal around that.
At Costco, we have a rule where if we want to try anything new or “indulge” in a treat, it has to be on sale… otherwise we stick to the basics (eggs, milk, or anything that’s already on our shopping list)
For fresh produce, we go to Asian supermarkets where fruits and vegetables are usually a lot cheaper than the big western supermarkets.
Batch cook and freeze.
Your beans and rice
Lentils
Chili
Anything that can freeze well. Pre portion it out and freeze. Also saves time cooking.
And i mean HUGE batches. Our last house we got a2nd hand chest freezer and were able to fill it after a massive cook over a weekend. We didn’t end up going to the grocery for a few weeks!
Look around your town, it’s there a Mormon church? They have pantries you can buy huge bulk of dried/ canned goods for incredibly cheap- in taklkng a case of 6 cans, each can 2 lbs oz of dried carrots for close to $64 (at least in my area). They are generally open to the public and you can order online. Buy cases of what you need, and you’ll serially be set for nearly a year or more on dry goods that you can rehydrate as you need them.
Here’s a link (and I’m catholic BTW and order from them)
https://store.churchofjesuschrist.org/new-category/food-storage/5637160355.c
Red beans and rice , Brazilian black beans
Sounds like you’ll need to make more granular / high effort changes. I suggest making your next shopping trip a research one. Do what local TV networks do: visit a few grocery stores and write down the price of everything you’d buy on your list. Usually no single store is cheaper, but certain items or categories are better at one store and vice versa.
Additionally, are you shopping sales? Meaning, browsing flyers (which are probably all digital) and building your meal plan based on sales?
Are you looking at which foods you can “downgrade”? E.g. only eating produce that is season, skipping the favorite but more expensive grapes for the cheaper ones, not indulging in cherries when you can have the blueberries on sale, etc. Whole produce instead of pre-cut. Plain vanilla granola instead of cinnamon honey toasted almond crunch. Just some ideas.
Done you use any of the grocery rebate apps? Ive saved quite a bit from those
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