Tag: grocery delivery

Instacart Review

This year, my #1 goal has been to lower my family’s grocery expenses from almost $1000 to no more than $772 each month.

For a lot of people, that number might seem huge. How do four people eat so much? For some people, that might seem like a ridiculously small amount. “How can they possibly subsist on so little?”

For me, grocery shopping is the thankless, difficult, necessary task that I do each and every week, going back again and again to the basics: meal planning, making lists, inventorying, not wasting food.

I love shopping at Aldi, the low-cost grocery store, but it’s 25 minutes away from my house, so getting there, buying groceries, and getting back to put them away can be a pain.

Enter: Instacart. A few weeks ago I saw a sign in Aldi that advertised grocery delivery with Instacart. For Aldi groceries! I was intrigued, and decided to spend the month of December testing the service out (because, with all of the running around and craziness in December, what better month to have groceries delivered straight to your door?

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A Year of Good Food: Grocery Delivery

Just two more months left to report for our grocery experiment. November was a month that was supposed to be short and easy to stay in budget, but, alas, it wasn’t.

A Year of Good Food: Grocery Delivery www.thethreeyearexperiment.com

The Reason for This Experiment

This year, our family is challenging ourselves to spend less on food so we can save and travel more. Last year, I adopted one habit a month that would translate into better money moves for our family. You can read all about our A Year of Good Habits here.

That experiment worked so well that we tried a new one this year. In 2018, we are challenging ourselves to do better at our food spending. Last year our family spent over $12,000 in groceries, or $966 per month.

This year, our goal is to spend 20% less on groceries. That may not sound like a lot, but it’s almost $200 per month in food savings. The extra $200 per month is going into a travel savings fund, so we can see the results of our hard work in spending less on food.

We could have adopted a radical goal to keep our spending under $500 or something like that. But we know better. We thought it made much more sense to consistently hit our modest target, month after month, for an entire year, to show ourselves we could do it, than to maybe hit the $500 goal once or twice and then face plant with more $1000+ grocery bills.

And if we consistently hit sub-$772 spending, then perhaps we’ll challenge ourselves next year to shave off more.

Each month, we’re trying out a new way to save money at the grocery store. Last month, I tried to cook a bunch of food each Sunday for us to eat during the week. But because I didn’t make clear menus for each week, it didn’t work as well.

November

While November was a short month, we packed a lot in. Mr. ThreeYear traveled for a week to New Hampshire. We went to South Carolina early in the month to visit my parents. We went to the beach for Thanksgiving. That meant that we were thrown off our routine and weren’t consistent and thoughtful grocery shoppers.

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