Several months ago, I started tracking how much we were spending on groceries. This is an area that I have never been very good at budgeting. I tend to buy what we need and then worry about how to pay everything else after.

Needless to say, that was not working very well.

I went through my banking statement for a few months and added up all of the purchases at the grocery stores. It was totaling $600+ per month!

I knew I could do better.

I decided to set my budget at $450 and stay within it. I have been successful at that for two months, so I wanted to share what I did.

I already buy in bulk and make a lot of stuff from scratch, so I am not going to talk about those things in this post. The changes I made that saved me over $150 in grocery costs were sale shopping and menu planning.

There are probably as many ways to do this as there are people who do it, but here is how I do it.

I menu plan usually one week at a time, but my grocery budget is for half a month at a time, so there are two different methods I use.

I’ll start fresh. When I am low on things and need to so a lot of shopping (usually around payday) the process looks like this:

I gather all of the sale fliers from the Sunday paper and I see what is on sale. Then, I plan my menu around what is on sale and make a shopping list.

When shopping sales, it helps to know the regular prices of all stores in your area. My method for doing this is kind of disorganized (but getting better!), but Trent at The Simple Dollar has a good post on making a price book that you might find useful.

(Side note: That is a great site. I plan to blogroll it as soon as I get around to doing a frugal blogroll.)

The important thing here is to make sure that the sale price is really the best price. I shop at one store that always has great prices (Hannaford, if you are in the Northeast) and sometimes great sales at other stores are still more than the Hannaford regular price.

The price differences can be quite sizable. For example, Hannaford charges $2.99 for Edy’s ice cream and Shaw’s gets $4.49 for it.

Back to menu planning. Meat is the leading factor in my menu planning, but I also incorporate other things that are on sale. For example, once I found a great deal on Mandarin oranges, so I made Mandarin Chicken.

The internet is great for this. Once I had some canned pineapple and some boneless chicken. I knew they would go together, but I didn’t have a recipe, so I just Googled “chicken pineapple recipe” and “chicken pineapple slowcooker recipe.”

As weeks go on, I have leftover items from previous weeks. Then my menu is more diverse. If the only thing on sale this week is ground turkey, and I have no other things on hand, I would have to make ground turkey every night, or meatless dishes.

But, if I stocked up on chicken the week before, I can incorporate that into my menu, too. The same goes for other things.

On the weeks that I am not shopping, my menu planning is pretty easy. I take an inventory of what I have on hand and plan around that.

For ideas, sometimes I ask the kids or my husband what they would like me to make with what we have available. And, of course, the internet can be your best friend in this area.

By just making these two changes - sale shopping and menu planning - I was able to tame a $600+ grocery budget to $450/month.

As time goes on, I am sure I will add other money-saving measures into the process - like using coupons - but this has been a great start toward getting my budget under control.

For more tips on frugal living, be sure to check out this week’s Frugal Friday over at Biblical Womanhood.