Cutting Your Grocery Bill During Covid

In March when our Prime Minister issued an “avoid all non-essential travel outside of Canada” advisory, the travel world came to a complete halt along with my pay cheque.

Those first 2 weeks after the advisory I was working 12 hour days helping clients who were scheduled to leave on vacation to cancel or reschedule, assisting clients in destination to get home and helping clients start their travel insurance claims, all with the knowledge that I wouldn’t be getting paid for any of the extra work being done.

Travel Consultants usually don’t get paid until after clients are home from their vacation and if a booking is cancelled, we don’t get paid at all. With no money coming in from my now non-traveling clients and with no new bookings from clients, it was time to get serious about our household expenses pretty quickly.

Getting a second part time job was not an option as we didn’t have anyone to be home with my youngest during the day and to help with her school work (our school board decided to not cancel the rest of the school year, so kids are receiving school work by Google Classroom to be done at home).

Our teen has continued working part time at her grocery store job and my husband works for an essential service company so he’s been able to keep working full time throughout all of this so far, however, there is the possibility that he could be at risk of being laid off if his accounts close or go on shut down because of Covid-19.

If this happened we will be relying on our credit cards and going into debt to make ends meet and like most people I know, we aren’t in a situation where we would be able to survive on any emergency savings for more than just a month or two.

Having grown up in a family with a single mom and 3 kids in the 70’s I know what it’s like to not have enough money to pay for basic expenses. There were many times that our family had to rely on the food bank to eat and Christmas sometimes came in the form of a food and gift hamper from Christmas Cheer.

I remember being worried about my mom’s ability to pay for rent and whether we would be evicted from our apartment and have to change schools again or whether we would have enough food to last through the week. I don’t want my girls to have to worry about family finances and I also don’t want them to feel as through we can’t enjoy a treat or splurge every once in a while but they also need to be aware of the situation that we currently find ourselves in.

I’m the one in our house who manages the family expenses so I have a pretty good idea of what goes in and what comes out of our bank account including our expenses for food so I knew that was an area where we could cut back on the amount we were spending every week.

Here’s how I cut back on our grocery bill:

I printed our bank statements and reviewed our grocery expenses for the months of January, February and March 2020 and calculated how much we spent on groceries every month.

We spent anywhere from $900 to $1400 each month for groceries. With a $500 difference from one month to the next, I knew that this was an expense that we would be able to cut as long as we had a strategy in place.

Since I’m the one who usually takes care of our grocery shopping, I knew that we could budget for around $200 per week for our family of 4 for groceries and I’m happy to report that we’ve been able to stick to that budget for the past several weeks!!

Here’s my weekly grocery strategy:

• I continue to use a shopping list to keep me on track but I also started reviewing what we have in our cupboard, fridge and pantry before heading out to the store to see what I have to use that week before it goes bad. Since we started doing this the amount of food wasted every week has decreased.
• I stopped buying groceries at Walmart and started shopping at No Frills again. I don’t enjoy the shopping experience at No Frills but I’m not tempted to buy other things that I don’t need and the prices are less expensive.
• We have a PC/Optimum Points account so we can collect points to use towards free groceries – I have accumulated about $40 in free groceries over the past 4 weeks. I plan to use those points if I have to go over our $200/week budget because of a birthday dinner or if we want to splurge on a few treats every once in a while.
• I review the store flyer and the PC point offers to decide on specific items that are cheaper that week or that will earn us more points.
• We buy no name or President’s Choice brand grocery items vs. big name brand items. For example No Name orange juice is around $2.79 vs. Tropicana which is usually $2 more.
• We bring our own reusable bags instead of paying extra for plastic bags.
• We’ve also started filling up for gas at Esso instead of Petro Canada because we can earn PC/Optimum points there as well.

I plan to continue our grocery shopping strategy once I start receiving a regular paycheck again. Once that happens we will be looking at ways to start paying down our credit card debt and beefing up our emergency savings fund. For now we will use that “extra” grocery money to pay our regular expenses and ensure that we don’t go further into debt or start using credit cards to pay for everyday expenses.

How much money does your family spend on groceries every week? What tips do you have for budgeting for groceries? Please share in the comments section below.