The grocery envelope
$620 a month. Set Mar. 7, 2026. Reviewed here Aug. 30, 2026.
Two adults, both of whom cook, one of whom is vegetarian four days a week and neither of whom will pretend that beans are a personality. The envelope covers food, cleaning products that get used up, coffee, and the dog's food is not in here — it has its own row because we wanted to be able to see what the dog costs.
How the $620 actually splits
| Where | Monthly |
|---|---|
| Weekly shop, $103 average | 446 |
| Warehouse run, every six weeks | 130 |
| Produce stand, May to October | 44 |
| Envelope | 620 |
The warehouse figure is the one that misleads. It is an average of a $180 trip that happens eight or nine times a year, so any given month either has one or does not, and a month with a warehouse run reads as a $50 overspend on a spreadsheet that does not know why. August was one of those. We considered moving the warehouse run into the sinking funds, where lumpy‑but‑predictable belongs, and decided against it on the grounds that it would make the grocery envelope look smaller than groceries are.
The two rules
The first is that the weekly shop happens once. Not a big shop and a top‑up; once. The top‑up trip was where somewhere between $40 and $60 a month was disappearing, and it disappeared because it never felt like a real trip.
The second is that the list is written against what is already in the house, not against a set of recipes. Recipe‑first meal planning produced a beautiful spreadsheet, four weeks of compliance, and a freezer with two‑thirds of a pork loin in it that we eventually threw out.
Prices are Spokane, mid‑2026, at two chain supermarkets and a warehouse club. They are not going to match yours, and we are not going to publish a price book — the point of this page is the shape of the envelope, not what a dozen eggs costs on any particular Thursday.
What we stopped counting
Two things. Herbs and spices, because the tracking cost more attention than the category was worth and it is maybe $9 a month. And the split between food and cleaning products, which we itemised for five months, learned nothing from, and abandoned in June. Both are still inside the $620; they are simply no longer broken out.
The corresponding thing we started counting is waste, once, for four weeks in April: everything that went in the bin uneaten, weighed. It came to 6.2 pounds and roughly $31. That was enough to change how the fridge is arranged and we have not repeated the exercise, because we already know what it would say.