Tomorrow is the final day of my pantry challenge. Since I'm not headed to the grocery store today or tomorrow, I decided to tally everything up and see how I did. I spent $96.41 on groceries this month!!

Now keep in mind that I am currently eating different food than my family right now, as I lose weight, and my meal plan changes every week. So I didn't count that food since I couldn't plan for the changes or just eat whatever we already had. So I technically spent more than that, but it was on stuff just for me.

But with that being said I bought TONS of stuff in that $96 that we didn't NEED, but they were simply on sale for a great price and I had a coupon: cookies, Rhodes rolls, fruit snacks, oatmeal, candy, Sobe drinks, Skinny Cows, soda, etc. I also bought things that I could have made: bread, milk (we have powdered milk), yogurt.

Here's the best part too... aside from being in need of some dairy and produce, my pantry, freezer, and food storage looks the exact same as before. It doesn't look like we lived off of it for a month, at all. Cool.

So I know that if we had NO money to spend on food I could feed my family, no problem. We'd miss the cheese, yogurt, and fresh produce the most. But we would have have milk still to help cover the need for dairy. And we have plenty of frozen and canned produce.

This was a fun little experiment to try. I think that I'll informally continue to do it. I plan to continue to pull from our storage regularly, but I won't be keeping track of my spending like before. I do plan to continue to buy the things that I can get a great deal on, rather than whatever my heart desires.

P.S. Ryan noticed a HUGE change in our credit card bill this month too. (We put everything on our credit card --paying it off each month, of course-- so we can see all of our expenses at a glance...and to earn lots and lots of American Express points...) Because I wasn't going to the store as often, I wasn't picking up a little extra something here and there. Apparently all those little things add up to big dollars. Oops.