re: Family budget question re: groceries/food/consumables

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One thing I’m also bad about is not using meats that I freeze. I’ll freeze something and not pull it out until 2 years later. I need to get better with that.

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I buy a half calf at a time, cut & wrapped for the freezer. I find it helpful to organize my chest freezer by date...oldest stuff on left, proceeding to newer stuff on far right. Makes it easy to determine what you should be cooking before it gets too old. Of course, everything gets dated when it goes in, in big block letters w/a sharpie.

We try to average $1200 a month on food/groceries/entertainment. Typically, we plan a week's worth of meals and shop for them on Tuesday. Weekends are almost always eating out or hosting parties. Sometimes we'll also go out during the week too, but are mostly frequenting happy hour specials. My wife is still young and in professional school, so a lot of our spending is due to hanging out with college kids (albeit older 20's/younger 30's "kids" they still want to go out all the time) and drinking quite often.

Hoping that our $1200 monthly budget for food/groceries/entertainment can be lowered to ~$1000 after she gets out of school.