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Money Saving Idea #1 – Cash For Food

This is the first in an ongoing series that will chronicle the different money saving ideas my wife and I try.

Hopefully it will provide some insight and inspiration to those of you having trouble coming up with ideas of your own.

Overweight or Over Budget

After looking at what we spend each month on groceries and eating out, you’d assume both are true. Using Mint.com and the Mint.com iPhone app, I have been able to categorize and track all of our expenses the past year or so. To be honest, I had only been using it to check up on our overall income and expenses each month, and only recently started making use of the more advanced features.

We spend an average of $750 a month on food, for two people! Granted, this does include the one or two $50 trips to Target each month that also include some household items. I don’t think we should spend any more than $400 a month on food, including eating out, so I wanted to find a way to keep it under control.

Loosen the Belt, Fatten the Wallet

I think $400 for two people is pretty generous and that we could feasibly work with $300 pretty easily, but coming from $750 per month, an almost 50% savings is a realistic goal.

My plan for the first of July is to withdraw $400 in cash and set it aside to be used only for food for the entire month. If we screw up and spend it all too quickly, we obviously won’t starve until August, but by physically seeing the pile of money shrink with every purchase I think we will spend more frugally and be more aware of the real cost of what we are buying.

Tracking Our Progress

It will be easy to track the progress of this little experiment, and I will try to post updates at the halfway point. Another positive thing about our new “cash for food” plan is that at the end of the month, we can use any money we have left over on a special night out.

In our first week, we’ve spent $99, $1 under our budget. So far so good. We’ll see what the rest of the month will look like.

Have you tried this method before? What have you done to curb your spending on food?

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