Blogging Bout Babies Budget and Balderdash

Two babies down.
$120 grocery shopping budget for a family of four. Say what?!
Plus all the crap in between.

It has been an extremely long time between posts.

I have decided to make this blog sort of like a journal for me to offload and connect with others and would love to hear your experiences and  advice.

I pre-apologies for any grammar and spelling mistakes before hand. Sorry to all grammar warriors out there. I'm writing in between feeds, toilet training and well everything else.

It has been a full on year for me.
This year I played single parent for 6 months while my partner was away for work, being pregnand with a very very active toddler is next level.
We bought our first investment property.
My sweet grandma earned her angels wings.
We welcomed our second additiona, Princess Aurora.
Then we also decided to finally seal the deal and get married this year.
What was I thinking?! *Head spining just writing this*
That's the my year in a nutshell.

Since our first born, my partner and I started to be even more 'careful' with our budget. We work like a little company that has annual economical conventions where we forecast our expenses for the next year. This year our convention had a lot of additional items in our minutes, the three biggest; our new addition, property and wedding.

I am happy to say we were very pracital with our expenses in general, especially with our new addition and our wedding. However out of the things I struggled with, it was the grocery budget.

Previously we did $150 per week as family. My partner insisted on $120 AUS/week for our shopping budget to feed a family of 4 (2 grown adults, toddler and new born.)  That is approximately $1.40/person per meal for 7 days.

I gave this a great good go. Before I go grocery shoppy I always forecast all our meals for the week so that I only do one shopping trip and I also minimise wastage for I buy only what we need.

I did well for the first two weeks on this budget, but struggled after for I didn't take into account misc items such as toilet paper, detergent, cleaning products etc.

I kept pushing it though, trying to fit evrything in our $120 a week. It was hard. I had to omit snacks and ended up buying extras in the middle of the week, which I hate doing for I feel like I failed.

After a four week trial, we increased our budgt to $140 per week, which makes a high difference.

Wanted to see how what the average family spends on their weekly shopping. Please comment for I would love to hear how other families do it.