One of the hardest places to cut spending is food. Obviously stop going out to eat. We don’t normally go out or order in, if we do, it’s usually really cheap. But we could easily spend $200 at the grocery store for just a weeks worth of meals. That adds up to $800 a month just for food!

To keep costs down, we shop at 2 places, Aldi and a local grocery chain, Martins. Martins has a coupon and gas program that we take advantage of. We also plan a week of dinners at a time and shop for those. We don’t buy name brand snacks, we usually find good deals at Aldi. My husband and son are basically garbage disposals when it comes to food, so we have to be very intentional about what we get.

Our week worth of dinners usually include 2-3 vegetarian meals. Not having to buy meat for 7 meals a week saves a lot of money. Black beans and corn go a long way and are a great meat substitute!

We try to stretch things so they cover more than one meal. We love getting a turkey breast for the crock pot. We will have turkey one night and then with the left overs we make turkey and noodles over mashed potatoes.

We buy most of our veggies at Aldi, they usually have a good selection. Then we buy our fruit at Martins. My husband prefers organic, so we only buy when it’s on sale.

My weakness is baking, I love to bake! I’ll make sure we have dessert for just about every night of the week. Cookies, brownies, pies, cobblers, you name it. I get my baking supplies from Aldi mostly and I can’t tell any difference in flavor.

As far as drinks go, we only buy ground coffee regularly and occasionally tea bags and juice. We don’t drink sodas or sugary drinks. That keeps us healthy!

With these little tricks, we keep our grocery bill under $150 per week for our family of 4. Thank goodness for breastfeeding!