Moving long distance is bad for your grocery budget

If you have ever moved a long distance you know what I mean. If not, let me explain.

You know how when you are menu planning you can count on having things like flour, ketchup, onions and garlic? When you move a long distance you don't generally take those things with you, so your first shopping trip or two tends to be just as much about restocking as it is feeding your family.

Here is how we plan to combat that.

Staples like flour, sugar and oatmeal are going with us. Refrigerator things like salad dressing and cheese are also going with us, but will be into a cooler packed with ice. If the cooler isn't opened and we repack it in ice at the hotel, it will be fine.

Anything frozen is going to friends. It just isn't worth food poisoning to try to drag a bag of chicken bought at 49¢lb across the country. A few weeks ago we started using up what was in both freezers and we are down to 4-5 bags of frozen veggies, a bag of frozen pick your own blueberries and a few random things.

When you move in to a new area you don't generally know the grocery stores well enough to know which one will give you the best deals. For the first few weeks, I usually investigate the stores in the area, and ask around. That usually makes your grocery spending higher than usual. I have looked online and found out that thew town we are moving to has a Save-a-lot, so I will probably make my first shopping trip there. Even though Save-a-lot isn't the cheapest on all things, if you are only going to one store, they generally will give you the lowest total.

Using these strategies isn't going to save us a ton of money, and may end up being more of a pain than it is worth, but the hope is that taking these things with us will allow us enough wiggle room in our grocery budget that we can replace the things that couldn't come with us without upping the grocery budget.

I would not bother to transport 99¢ salad dressing, 49¢ mustard, etc. We are only taking things like the $4 salad dressing, the $15 lb cheese and the like. I am not that crazy... at least I don't think I am. We are moving ourselves, and have plenty of room in the truck, so it only makes sense. If we were paying by the pound, we would not pay to transport flour!