February is only buy necessities month!

Hehehe.. Hey, junkfood and soda is MY food. Every time I go to grocery, I always make sure I have those in my basket. For this month, I have a tight budget because I just paid my rent. I grabbed only those that I needed the most but I still have junkfoods in my cabinet.

No take-out is a great way to save money. A pizza and a bottle of soda is about $15 at our local pizza place. I bought a frozen pizza dough, a package of mozzarella cheese (and a package of taco cheese-buy one get one), a large jar of sauce, chopmeat, a package of pasta (organic!)and a package of soft taco shells...all for $15 and change. I fed my family for three nights (and I & my hubby had pasta for lunch for 2 days) for the same price as apizza and bottle of soda! And we had pizza anyway...which my sons had fun helping me make. Now they want to know when we can make pizza again! Great tips everyone!!

This sounds like a good idea, save you money and be healthy.

That is a great plan. Then once you get started and keep doing this, you won't even miss the things that you didn't buy. I never buy chips or snacks like that anymore and we don't even miss them. I do have to have my diet pepsi to get me threw the day, so not buying soda would kill me!

usually im pretty good about doing that but just give me a reason to celebrate and it all goes to hell!! once i have an excuse to spend a little extra on like fast food then all of a sudden i find another reason to either celebrate or that i have no time to eat at home so HEY! lets get MORE fast food!! lol.. but i usually can go months with out overly spending on stuff food wise we dont need.. but when i fall off the wagon it takes me a week or two to get back to being strict

good luck! If there is a will, there is a way!

Wow, this is a great goal! I'm not sure I would be able to achieve this, though, without weaning myself off junk food and soda first. I'm a junk food and soda junkie and, to be honest, I can't imagine not having just a little something around for now and then. :-)

That sounds like an awesome plan.. I hope it works for ya NO junk food?? ouch! that's not gonna be easy at all.. I would cut down on the junk but not cut it completely out. it might be that you are setting yourself up for a fail when you go look for a twinkie and there isn't any! I have to budget for a month at a time. My husband is a supervisor, where he works and gets paid monthly.. you wouldn't believe how hard that is to manage! groceries are easier buying in bulk (sam's club is a god send! lol!) I have 3 teenagers.... we can't leave out junk food! lol!

Hey saundly! I try to do my big food shopping at the beginning of the month. I try to plan what I will be cooking and buy what I will need for the month. I do this for two reasons. I get a certain amount of money to spend and I don't have a car so I walk to the store and must take a taxi back. So I don't want to have to make more than one trip if possible. I find that the more times I go to the grocery store the more money I will spend anyway. This way if I limit the trips I tend to stay away. Although I usually spend my limit on the big trip! If I do have to go back it means walking there and back and carrying the grocerys a really long way!

Being newlyweds, my husband and I learned first hand to only buy the necessities and I think it is such a great goal. I hope to keep it that way ourselves lol. It has been hard not having a lot of junk food in the house. But we had to since money is tight and trying to cut back in terms of our health. But I can say we keep junk like Kool-Aid if we need a sugar rush and pretzels, microwave popcorn for snacks. Since it is just two of us, food stretches far and we only had to replace food like lunchmeat, cheese, milk, and bread. We go to places like Aldi's and Save-a-lot for our chicken, fish, beef, etc. We actually spend on average like $50-60 dollars or even less on food.