Still not able to knock that grocery budget down? It’s time to stop looking at the spending, and start evaluating the budget.

Most Americans spend at least $40-50 per person each week on food. Sound high? Break down the numbers. At $6 a day… $1 for breakfast, $1 for lunch, $1 for a snack, and $3 for dinner? How much does each meal actually cost? Don’t forget juice, soda, milk, coffee, tea, creamer, sweeteners. Protein powders, diet shakes, candy, gum, mints, ice cream. What does each person in your family put in their mouths each day, and how much does it cost?

Now, add in the cost of coffee and fast food on the way to work or running errands; lunch out with coworkers; soda and snacks from the vending machine; an occasional drink after work, or a few bottles of wine; maybe fast food or even a restaurant family meal.

Yikes.

Now add in to your grocery cart the additional items: OTC products like aspirin, cold or allergy treatments, Visine, band-aids, vitamins…and on to beauty and person care items like toothpastes, tooth brushes, shampoos, razors, tampons (and accessories  )…and don’t forget the cleaning items for dusting, vacuuming, mopping, polishing, wiping and sanitizing. Throw in the odd laundry basket and dish towel, and you’ve got…

A grocery budget.

Despite what most budget planners would like to believe, the grocery budget requirements are fairly fixed. While there may be some items you can eliminate, there are quite a few that you can’t. To set a realistic budget, you need to look at these costs straight on. Work out the numbers. Do not assume sales, coupons, or any other cost cutting measures. You can learn to decrease costs, but to set a realistic budget, you have to be realistic for the present, current, actual expenses.

The list of expenses can probably be cut. Again, be realistic. It’s easy to say you will start taking your lunch, cut out all snacks, skip the vending machine. It’s quite another thing to do it, and continue doing it over months and years. The GOAL is not to get the budget as low as possible; the goal is to create a budget that you can stay within, and then apportion it into your overall budget for living expenses.

Once you have a budget, the goal is to maintain the boundaries. This is not DECREASING the boundaries. The problem with grocery budgets is generally not that the expenses are increasing; it’s that other costs are running over, and you try to decrease the grocery expenses to accommodate everything else!

If you don’t think so…ask yourself four questions:

1. when was the last time you ate spaghetti for a week so you could afford trendy shoes, a better vacation, a manicure, lunch or dinner out…

2. when was the last time you passed on new shoes so you could eat steak, fresh produce, or a higher quality breakfast cereal?

3. when was the last time you put savings from your grocery budget into the bank?

4. when was the last time you put savings from your grocery budget into a different purchase?

Once you have a realistic grocery budget, and have carved it’s place into your overall budget, then you can begin to work on decreasing costs using sales, coupons, rebates, and stockpiling to save money, and even reducing the budget requirements. Until then, you are setting yourself up for failure.