Grocery shopping 12-10-11

First a shout-out to MMM for his recent shout-out. In case it's not obvious I'm prone to hero worship. It's kind of awesome that I'm on the master's radar. I'll try not to disappoint.

Let's see. Today was a mixed bag for Mustachianism but a good day all around. I went to get a hair cut — not very Mustachian — $17 with tip. I should have bought a Universal Men's Grooming Device weeks ago, but I didn't because I convinced myself it was small potatoes compared to getting my grocery bill down. I'm torn between feeling like I have to do everything correct right now and accepting slow incremental improvements. In any case my company's Christmas party is this evening which meant I had a reason to go out and get a hair cut.

Then came grocery shopping. We had $30 carry over from last week's budget, plus this week's $85. Spent a surprisingly low $38 at Harris Teeter: the big ticket items were Progresso soup, crackers, lunch meats, and ground beef. Don't worry, we bought everything on sale, as usual — we saved $28 on our $38 this trip. Dinner this week is going to include (home-made) pizza, tuna casserole (mostly for leftovers to freeze), Asian stir-fry, and chili. We also stopped by Trader Joe's to pick up vegetables and eggs. I splurged on a few different kinds of chocolate since I felt like we were operating well within our budget, so the bill came to $24. On one hand I like the idea of rewarding ourselves for spending less money, but that's hardly Mustachian and those extra dollars would be really nice too. I'm looking to resist those urges in the future and have frugality be its own reward. We'll see how that goes.

So we have $30 + $85 - $38 - $24 = $53 left in our budget. Not bad. That's well more than we need to cover a run to the store in case we forgot something. I'm debating whether to allow surplus grocery budget money to go towards alcohol since we have zero wine in the house. That's a decision for another day.