A trip to Wal-Mart tonight leaves me disappointed as some of the foods we had scouted before the turn of the new year have gone up since January 1st. I would assume the jump is because of the rise in Missouri’s minimum wage from $6.50 to $7.25. We noticed quite the handful of foods had increased in price since the turn to 2008.
Notables which affect my mealplan more directly is 12 packs of ramen rising $0.08 from $1.42 to $1.50, Great Value Tuna rising a whopping $0.09 from $0.47 to $0.56, and most disappointing of them all is the jump in price of eggs $0.45 from $2.48 to $2.93. Other things also rose such as the Great Value Light Butter Spread.
What does this mean? I definitely have to critique the meal plan, based on what I want to buy right now if I didn’t change quantities I would be over by a few dollars. Previously I had been under the alotted $60 by a matter of mere pennies.
My new strategy is to hopefully use less bread. I’m going to buy a can or two less tuna, and a loaf less bread. I had planned on having a bread and butter type side with spaghetti when I make it but I can cut down on that and random pieces of peanut butter toast to allow me to shave off some extra money. Realistically it’d be cheaper to buy brown sugar instead of bananas to accompany my oatmeal, but at this point in time I really want to hang on to that fruit I’m getting by having the bananas with my oatmeal. Also, I am contemplating getting the medium sized eggs instead of the large eggs as they’re cheaper, but my money isn’t being used as efficiently still because I’m just not getting as much nutritional value.
This definitely makes things an extra bit interesting.
