Martha, I've said before and I will say again, groceries depend so much on where you live. We live in an agricultural state with a low cost of living, so it helps a lot. For example, we can wait for a sale and get a roasting chicken for about $.69/lb, buy 10 of 'em, and stick 'em in the freezer. Prices were much higher last time we were in BC.

We have me, my DH, my 16 yo brother, and our 13 month old DS, Michelle. DH is the only big eater, though, and we eat vegetarian at least a couple of times a week.

We eat vegetarian min once a week here.    I can't remember .69 a lb for any meat !    funny how price ranges from coast to coast.   Our produce and fruit are very reasonable here.    I do the same thing, wait for sales and get the deals.

makes a big difference in budgets!   do you use cloth diapers?  I know even disp. here are twice the price as the US.  

I think my pet food bill is close to $100 a mth :)

 We use disposables; we've a discount store here called Aldi, and we get the size 5's for 17 cents/diaper there. Probably still more expensive than cloth, but worth it to me, as I stiiiiink at keeping up with the laundry without adding diapers into the mix.

You guys have the Okanagan for all the produce type stuff, right? We fortunately can grow ton of stuff here and have a fairly long growing season, so gardening is absolutely a worthwhile endeavor (as is hitting the little farm stands!).

cheapest diapers here are .25 each.  dd refused to tiolet train until she was 4 and I just took them away so 2 in diapers was expensive! 

yes but most stuff is more local then that.  Okanagan is great for cherries, peaches etc but it is 5 -6hr drive from here.  so if you travel there is way cheaper but by the time it get here ...... nice but not the cheapest.  apples all year round.

there are lots of very local farms and greenhouses. of course stuff comes from the US etc.   

We can grow lots here just most of it wouldn't get eaten here.   ds will eat fresh strawberries and blueberries not frozen. either kids likes jam much..strange I know. they don't like applesauce either.  dh eats a limited menu.  pb honey or grape jelly.   no one but me eats pies or crisps.  When the kids get older maybe they will.  fresh apples, bananas, mandarins etc they are fine with.  lucky they are cheap enough!

I have raspberry and blueberry bushes. my neighbours have an apple tree, another a cherry tree that we can pick from but the cherries don't last long with us.

lots of people have large gardens here especially italians etc and asians/south asians where they live in the city but the yard is mostly garden with greenhouses.

We can grow just about anything here.  all types of fruit trees, there is even fig trees in front of an apt a few blks away.

what can I say  :) 

Picky eaters are hard on the budget! It's taken us about a year to retrain baby brother (he's only been with us that long) to eat a full menu of food, as opposed to frozen pizza and McDonalds. Fortunately, DH was raised by immigrant parents who brooked no dissent on the food, so he'll eat anything. We grow:

Lettuce (I love the fancy expensive kinds, so we grow 'em)

Green beans

Soyabeans

Carrots

Potatoes

Sweet potatoes

Onions

Garlic

Plums

Apples

Nectarines

Plums

Peaches

Hazelnuts

Blackberries

Raspberries

Green peppers

Tomatoes

Almonds

Squash

Melons

My ILs, who are in Richmond, BC have a similar garden, only they grow kiwi (which don't do well here) and mushrooms.

You can use fruits in lots of things other than jelly, pie, or crisp. My family loves pork chops with apples (nope, we don't keep kosher), open-faced sandwiches with cheese,  almond slices, and either pear or apple slices, apple cake, apple-ham strata, etc. Berries can be mixed into salads, baked into bars with oatmeal/granola, even used to make a glaze for meat. If you can get your hands on some old (ooold) cookbooks, they did a lot more with their fruits/veggies back then because they had to, and imho, gardening and relying on the garden's bounty one of the biggest reasons we're able to keep our budget as low as we do.

Hofmama:

We have me, my DH, my 16 yo brother, and our 13 month old DS, Michelle. DH is the only big eater, though, and we eat vegetarian at least a couple of times a week.

OK , I have Dh and 2 teenage boys. I was going crazy trying to lose another $50 a month to match you lol I was wondering if you knew something I didn't. There's no way I can do $25 a week in groceries....for awhile yes but then the canning room, pantry and freezer needs restocked again. And I will never get these guys to eat vegetarian even for a couple of days...they are meat and potatoes type menfolk. Or meat and rice. Or meat and pasta. Or meat and....! I have gotten them to eat spaghetti w/o meat by adding TVP instead of meat.

Great, great job!

I have been training dh, what he eats now compared to what he used too.  this is a man who is happy with fries, hamburgers, ham bunwiches, hotdogs and kd.   he can't eat eggs, whole grains like oats or nuts.  white rice and white refined flour all the way.

our student is asian and is just starting to learn to eat western food.  fruit and veggies well he will learn because he is normall teenager!

I can lower my groceries if I bought less convenice foods for lunches.  dinners are easy and cheaper.    lunch meat is cheap at $5 a lb.   no pb for lunches because dh works at a school and of course the kids go to school.   heating leftovers isn't much of a option for schools either.  they don't get a much of a eating period.    also snacks.   Even I pack easy stuff to eat in the car to and from work like bananas because I can't eat breakfast early before we go and need a snack on the way home. dh is the same way.

but I buy everything on the cheapest sales for snacks and juice boxes plus whatever I can like tp, laundry soap etc.   most of my groceries are only bought on sale or i would spend more. 

I have to work on leftovers and me cooking more.  since I am the only cook it is hard when I don't feel like cooking. 

We all eat fresh fruit and dh likes canned of course because of sugar in it. but he doesn't open the cans and bring them to work.

It would be great to have your grocery prices!  especially meat :)   We don't go though a ton of it because a little goes a long way here.

I haven't written or set up a budget for the month of January as yet but will work on one.

I am proud to say that I didn't spend anything on Christmas/ Holiday gifts as I regifted items I received.

A gift I received from my boss went to my mother; I gave a close friend a pair of brand new earrings that I'd treated myself to almost 2 years ago

only to never take out of the box. ( I haven't done that since) Both love their gifts and I had the wrap from I don't know how many years ago so zero $$ spent.

As I received a few gifts that came from Walmart so I returned the items as I would not purchase or use them

for the value on a gift card and will use the balance for things that I need this month or whenever I need something this year.

In 2008 I was fortunate to find many sales and purchased things like hair products, body wash, and other essentials at ridiculous prices.

At $1.00 for Dial & Dove  body washes I couldn't pass the sale up.  The same for the deodorant, popular name brands for a $1.00!!

I'm working on a food budget, this will prove to be the most difficult as there are picky eaters here but I will do it.

Congrats to everyone and may 2009 be full of savings. 

 Yeah, an extra teenage boy would definitely make our budget much higher! Baby brother is a light eater, like I am, so it's really not analogous to most teenage boys who eat as if there was no tomorrow! :) And a lot of our stocking comes from different budget lines; we put aside DH's tutoring money towards a beef in the fall, and my brother works in a nursery (a wholesaler, the folks who start 'em from seed for the commercial nurseries), so we get our garden plants for free/very reduced depending on what extras tehy have at his work. 

Getting DH to go without meat has required muuuuch wheedling. He's a meat and meat kind of guy, but he's willing to do the vegetarian thing as long as it's no more than 2x/week (mostly because he's even cheaper than I!) :)

 Some thoughts: first, re cooking: crockpot and freezer meals. The 16 yo isn't much of a cook, but he can handle "Heat oven to 350, bake uncovered 30 minutes." Frozen Assets, by Deborah Taylor-Hough, might be worth checking out from the library, and there's an army of crockpot recipes on the internet.

We only get lunch meat as a special treat because it is insanely expensive. For lunches, some things you could make:

Quesadillas (spread a tortilla (you can use corn tortillas for your DH) with cheese, peppers, cooked chicken; nuke a few minutes. Perfectly delicious cold, you could even send it with little containers of salsa and sour cream)

Tortilla roll-ups (spread a tortilla with cream cheese, pineapple or other preferred fruit, shredded cheese. roll up like a jelly roll, slice)

Crudites with a variety of "dips" (ranch dressing, cottage cheese, yogurt, salsa, whatever you think they'd eat)

Tuna salad with crackers

A thermos for DH would hold things like chili, soup, etc

Salad with leftover dinner meat shredded on top, some croutons, and the dressing in a separate little container

I've found it's totally worthwhile to invest in some little Tupperware containers for lunches if you have family in school/work.  You might also want to ask your student about "bento boxes" if he's Japanese. They're really popular ways of doing lunch over there: http://www.airandangels.com/bentobox/. 

 Good luck. I'm always looking for ways to cut all of my expenses; to me, frugal living is a process of continually searching for a better and more efficient way to use our resources.