A couple of weeks ago I was down to collecting the spare change in the house to make it another week to payday. I managed to scrounge up $15. With that, I bought $5 worth of gas to get to work for the week; the remaining $10 I used for food for a week. Yes, it was a lean and somewhat uninteresting week, but it set me on the path to cut my expenses by being aware of what I spent. I took a good hard look at how I had spent my money for the past two months and realized it was crazy out-of-hand.
So that day I bought a loaf of bread at the bakery outlet for 79 cents. For a few days I had tuna salad or pimento cheese or chicken salad sandwiches and fruit.
Payday came and I spent $145 on groceries to last a month. That included buying family packs of things like ground beef, pork chops, etc. and dividing them into individual servings to freeze. I also got a couple of roasts and a whole chicken, a pound of sausage and a package of pepperoni. Then there was bread, cheeses and fresh produce.
I take my lunch every day and cook from scratch. I find a lot more satisfaction in making a wonderful homemade large pizza for $2.50 that makes two or three meals for me than I do in eating out (not just because our restaurant choices are so limited here.)
This stash has already lasted me two weeks and basically I've used mostly the ground beef. I make large casseroles that I can make several meals from - cook once, eat many times. I keep a couple of those going at a time, freezing some of the leftovers so I can trade off and not get sick of eating the same thing.
I easily have enough food in my freezer to go at least another two weeks -- probably longer.
It's all a trade-off. You have to decide if money is scarce enough to make a plan to spend less, or if eating lobster brings you enough pleasure to make the cost worth it. For me, well, lobster is nice, but it doesn't bring me an amount of satisfaction that is worth the extra cost. I'd personally rather make a great pizza, eat some wonderful fresh fruit and maybe bake some cookies, and stop running out of money before payday. That's speaking only for my budget; I don't have any argument with anyone who chooses to budget their money differently. For me, I find satisfaction in the creative use of what I have on hand, and coming up with as many ways as possible of using the same basic ingredients in completely different ways. (Ground beef has gone in a casserole, a spaghetti sauce, pizza and finally tonight sloppy joes, as well as just plain cheeseburgers. All that from an $8 package of family pack ground chuck.)