After adding up my grocery expenses for September, here is the grand total expended for the month:

$11.80

This is for all food, including fruit, vegetables, meat, milk, cheese, eggs, and my favorite gourmet coffee. Many of these items were also organic. $11.80 fed myself, my boyfriend, and quite a few dinner guests – not to mention the fact that I added a ton of items to my food stockpile.

And, this figure also includes all household items, such as foil, sponges, dish soap, toilet paper, paper towels, napkins, toiletries, and so forth. It also includes all my Sunday newspapers – more coupons! – and paid for some new kitchen pans and utensils.

All of my shopping trips for September are documented in the September 2008 archive, if you’d like a more detailed overview of what this amount got. Also, you’ll notice that there were several trips where I left the store with more money than I came in with, during those instances where I was given change back from catalina coupons, or had coupons that produced more overage than I anticipated. I never aim to get “money back” from my purchases – I always plan on using my overage to pay for other items. But sometimes the register goes into the negative anyway, when an item rings up less than you anticipated, or if you forget to check a price. Stores are reimbursed by the manufacturers for coupons redeemed, and depending on the store’s policy, sometimes they will give you cash back. In these instances, I adjusted my budget total accordingly to include this “profit”.

For October’s grocery budget, I am setting aside one $20 bill. Let’s see how much I have left over at the end of the month!

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 at 6:15 pm and is filed under Budget. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.