The Class That Saved Me $10,800/ Year (& Taught Me How to Cook!)

The Class That Saved Me $10,800/ Year (& Taught Me How to Cook!)

One of the cornerstones to my frugality is my grocery budget: I spend $75/ week for our family of 5. But it didn’t used to be like that. We used to spend $300/week… back when there were just 3 of us!

It was a problem.

Reducing our grocery spending didn’t come easy to me. I just thought that I’d get whatever looked good at the store and we’d never be hungry. But somehow, we’d always wind up getting take out, despite spending more than $100 per person a week on food at the grocery store.

If it weren’t for Erin Chase of $5 Dinners, I’d probably still be living off of takeout and deeply in debt!

Pardon my French, but I really sucked at budgeting for groceries.

When I finally decided to try, I would make these crazy meal plans and then never cook the meals. Because someone whose cooking routine included cooking pasta and making tacos can totally master coq au vin on a Tuesday, right?

At first, I tried to get into couponing (I mean, those women on Extreme Couponing make it look so easy). I would buy the Sunday paper for coupons, only to end up buying tons of things with coupons that we didn’t need. It took a while for me to realize that I wasted money instead of saved it.

Finally, I gave up. I figured that I must be doomed to be a meal planning failure forever!

On I whim, I picked up Erin Chase’s book at the library, and my eyes opened. Erin Chase saved our budget. No seriously, she did.

Thanks to Erin’s book, I learned how to meal plan, grocery shop, coupon, and cook well. She taught me how to spend less than $5 on every meal to feed my family. Yup, $5 per meal for my whole family of 5!

Now that I was only spending $5 per meal (or less!), I reduced my grocery spending by over 75%! That saved us hundreds of dollars every month that we could put into paying off debt and building savings!

Think about it: what would you do if you saved 75% of your grocery budget?

It took me a long time to improve our grocery shopping, but it was well worth it. Over time, Erin taught me everything I needed to know, including how to cook!

You don’t have to wait for years to see the results like I did, though. You can skip right to the easy way to save money on groceries!

Erin has an amazing online course available a few times a year called The Grocery Budget Makeover. It teaches you step-by-step how to cut your grocery spending by a lot (“a lot” as in 50% or more is pretty standard).

If you think you spend too much on groceries and you’ve struggled with meal planning, you would be crazy not to get this course. The Grocery Budget Makeover is the class that saved me $10,800/ year.

I’m embarrassed to tell you that when I started to try to take charge of my grocery budget, we were spending over $1,200/month to feed three people (and one of them was a baby!). Thanks to Erin Chase, our grocery budget has completely changed. And we now spend less than $300/month to feed five people.

The class will likely pay for itself in the first month (if not the first week!)

Some of the topics covered in the class are:

• Changing your attitude towards cooking.
• Getting a basic reference sheet of favorite meals.
• Advanced meal planning.
• Couponing.
• How to meal plan well.
• How to avoid marketing traps when shopping.
• Creating an effective shopping list.
• How to stockpile (for normal people).
• How to score freebies.
• Time-saving kitchen and cooking hacks.

They have several bonuses including cooking tutorials and a whole lesson on saving money when shopping for allergy friendly foods! As a mom with a little guy who can’t eat milk, eggs, or wheat this was a blessing! You can get the class here!

Erin Chase and her whole $5 Dinner revolution helped make it possible for me to stay at home with my kids when she taught me how to make over our grocery budget.

Once you learn them, you have those skills for life! At the time of writing, it’s been 3 years since we reduced our grocery spending from $1,200 to $300/month. Which is a total savings of $32,400!

It’s difficult for me to imagine what our life would be like if I never learned these skills. We would be struggling, that’s for sure!