Shopping

Dear Shell,

More and more I'm realizing, I really hate shopping. Clothes shopping is the worst but grocery shopping is starting to climb up the list rather rapidly. Prices have gone up, doubled coupons are a thing of the past, and product sizes have gone down.

One grocery shopping trip worth of food usually lasts roughly 2 weeks. So I go grocery shopping twice a month, picking up the staples (pasta, sauce, rice, cheese, meats...etc). then usually once a week I go to the corner store and pick up milk and bread, since we go through those fairly regularly. I usually get our ground hamburger/sirloin from the corner store as well, the quality of the meat is worth the 10 cents more a pound over Wal-Mart's price (when I cook the Wal-Mart meat and have to drain over 1 cup of grease out of a 1 lb package of hamburger at a 90/10 mix...but with the corner store I don't have to drain ANY grease...the quality is much better at the corner store).

The past three years, I've had our monthly grocery budget set at $250 a month, and for the two of us this was plenty. but in the past six months, I'm seeing our grocery bills climb, and climb, and climb. This month alone... $195 two weeks ago, $169 today. And that's WITH coupons. I saved over $40 with coupons this month. So for September, we've already hit $364 just counting the two grocery trips. And we're buying the same damn things we always buy, but it doesn't seem to last as long as it used to (and this is even with me cutting down how much I cook for dinner, watching portions, etc).

We're cutting down on our miscellaneous/fun spending, to help funnel some of that budgeted money toward groceries, so we haven't had a huge impact overall on a monthly basis.

I need to finish my book, get it published, have it hit best seller lists... and get rich! yeah, that's it! :)

Shell