Giving Up This Grocery Store Purchase Is Better for My Wallet and My Health

It's amazing what a difference giving up one item makes.

For a long time, soda has been one of my favorite indulgences at the grocery store. While I try to buy mostly healthy, organic items, I really enjoyed having a can or two of soda over the course of the day -- so I'd end up breaking out my credit cards to buy it every time I went to the grocery store.

Recently, though, soda prices have been rapidly increasing -- along with the costs of many other grocery items. The price of soda pop has been seeing pretty dramatic increases, though. While the average cost for a 12-ounce can sold in a 12-pack of soda was $0.35 per can in January 2019, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the price has now gone up to a whopping $0.51 on average.

As prices have gone up, I've made the conscious decision to opt out of buying it -- and not only has this been great for my wallet, but it's also better for my health as well.

Swearing off soda has saved me a fortune

When I was buying soda, I was typically consuming about two cans a day and my husband would occasionally drink a can or two as well. And although we don't give soda to our kids, we'd have it available for our guests.

With all of this soda compensation, we'd usually end up buying around six or seven 12-packs a month. And, this started to really add up. In fact, when I looked at our grocery budget, I realized we were spending close to $50 a month just on soda alone. That's a whopping $600 per year -- much more than I want to spend on a product that has no nutritional value.

Worse, drinking this soda wasn't good for me. The amount of sugar it contains was disturbing, and I realized that if I had it in my house, I was going to be a lot more tempted to drink it and thus consume a lot of calories I didn't need plus other ingredients I try to avoid like high fructose corn syrup.

Between the money I was wasting and the potentially damaging health effects, I made the commitment to just stop buying it altogether. Not only that, but I opted to entirely stop buying any kind of flavored drinks. Instead, I would switch to tea, milk, or water (sometimes flavored with fruit).

While it was a little bit of an adjustment for the first few weeks, I do not miss it any more and I'm very happy to have ended up with extra money that I can put into savings instead of wasting it on an unhealthy drink.

Soda's not the only unhealthy food that can come at a big cost

After cutting soda from my grocery budget, I started to realize that many unhealthy products tend to add unnecessary costs when it comes to food spending. Candy and overly- processed food, tend to have pretty high prices and I'm far better off using that money for other things instead.

So, if you're looking for ways to reduce your grocery spending and you're still drinking soda or buying other sugary snacks and drinks, giving up these indulgences could be one great option. You may just find, like I did, that you don't miss them at all once they aren't around to tempt you.