End of November: How'd I do with the grocery budget?

In short: I did pretty darn good! Our total food budget is $600 a month, which is $500 for groceries, toiletries, and cleaning products, and $100 for eating out and fast food. We DID get fast food a few times this month. Due to a death in the family, we were on the road a lot and we did get fast food 4 times (2 Sunday afternoon pizzas, 1 trip to Popeye's, and a trip to McDonalds). I'm not real proud of that, but it happens, and I'm not going to beat myself up over it. Honestly... 1 meal out per week is still amazing compared to how we were eating even three months ago.

We ended up spending a total of $635 for the month for food. I'm very satisfied with that number, because I feel like I'm doing a great job of shopping smarter, and I can see the difference in our bank account. We only dipped into the red one time this month, and then were back out within a day or two. We used to hit the red within the first week of the month, and we pretty much stayed there all month long. So scary.

I'm also lucky that we didn't host Thanksgiving, so while I spent $25 on supplies for dessert I brought to the meal, and we spent another $35 on ingredients to cook my parents a meal while we were visiting, it's still probably less than we would have spent for the entire holiday meal. This price also includes a frozen turkey that I picked up for $3 the day after Thanksgiving, to use for Christmas which we WILL be hosting.

All in all, I'm very happy with the stockpile I'm building, and the prices I'm learning to pay for food and other items we use around here. I organized our bathroom stockpile and we have 3 bottles of body wash, 5 men's deodorant, 3 adult toothpastes, 2 kids' toothpastes, 1 bottle of shampoo, and some other odds & ends piled up for the future. I liked seeing it all together, and knowing that nobody would run out of body wash for a long, long time!