Eat From the Pantry Challenge: Our Goals

For the Month of January my Family is going to attempt to participate in Money Saving Mom and Life as Mom's "Eat From the Pantry Challenge." You can read more about the challenge here or here, but basically each family is encouraged to set their own goals that are realistic for them. If you are interested in participating you should also read the post here "My Pantry is Different from Yours" it will help you in setting goals for your own challenge!

I still hope to do quite a bit of freezer cooking this month since having prepared meals is so helpful while I am in graduate school!

So here are our family's goals for the Eat From The Pantry Challenge:

1) Stop at the store a maximum of three times in January.

2) Buy mostly "fresh" foods including meat, bread, dairy (milk, eggs, cheese, etc.) and produce (fruits/vegetables) (I will allow myself to purchase a few "pantry" items to round out a meal and I will still pick up any free or super cheap after coupon "pantry" items to store for future months-but this will come out of our budget!)

3) Cut our typical grocery budget in half from $290 to a a total of $145 or less on groceries during the month of January.

**we usually have dinner out once a week as a family (this comes out of a separate budget so we plan to continue eating out)