$15 for your BEST grocery money saving tips
September 15, 2007 · Print This Article
I’m on a mission to cut our grocery bill. I may be a financial planner, but I’m not the most frugal or patient person in the world. Which means I’m not the best shopper in the world.
We spend way too much money on groceries! I’ve been doing better – watching store ads, noticing which stores have the best prices on my favorite items – but I still have a long way to go, and I’m serious about cutting the grocery bill.
So… I’m giving away $15 for the best grocery money saving tip.
Here’s how it will work. The contest is “My Best Grocery Money Saving Tip”. In the comment section, give a quick tip about how you save money on your grocery bill. It can be about using coupons, shopping at wholesale clubs, using a price book – whatever works for you.
I’m serious about saving money on groceries, so I want your best tips, no matter how small or silly they may seem.
The person with the best tip will win $15 delivered via PayPal on September 22. All tips
must be received by 9PM Friday, September 21. You may enter as many tips as
you want (one tip per comment please).
Be sure to either leave a link to your website/blog or your
email address in your comment so, that I am able to contact you if you’re the winner.
Come back often to check out the tips submitted, and be sure to visit the blog on September 22 to find out who the winner is. I’m looking forward to your tips!
If I were to undertake the goal of cutting my grocery bill, this is what I would do.
First, I would take the goal and look at if from a whole different perspective. Instead of looking at the specific goal of “cutting my grocery bill” I would look at the generalized goal of “saving money.”
I would carry that goal of saving money into every aspect of my finances, but particularly into the area of frivolous spending.
Having done that, whenever I find myself wanting to buy something I don’t really need, I tell myself no, and write down the price of the item in a notebook. Instead of eating out, I eat at home and write down the price of a restaurant meal.
At the end of the month/week I’ll look at the notebook and see how much I’ve saved. That saved money can then be applied as a credit to any area of my finances, in this case groceries.
This is what I do weekly.
I run through the coupon books that come with Sundays paper and clip coupons. Then, I take a look at the sales papers and jot down what I see on sale that my family enjoys. Based on whats on sale, I then hand write my meal plan. This is great because my meal plan is based on sale items (YAY). I then head to the store and purchase just what I need that on my meal plan andI am done.
It saves, time, money and energy
Use Angel Food Network food as the basis for your monthly food menu. There food is generally very delicious and is as cheap as it gets.
I always plan out my meals, I never shop without a grocery list and I don’t buy something unless it is on my list. Also I do my grocery shopping weekly and don’t make multiple trips to the store in between. One trip per week or 4 trips a month is all. That is the biggest saver for me, because it saves both time, money and gas money!
Leave the kids at home. Not that they beg a lot, but they distract me from finding good deals.
I really try to buy only what’s on sale at the store and if I happen to have a coupon for the sale items, I’ve struck gold! I just posted about my great lemonade deal on my blog…sales price for a half gallon was $1.69 plus I had a $1.00 coupon so the final price was .69!! (Now if only the price of milk were that cheap…)
I just thought of another tip…don’t overbuy on coldcuts and/or fresh produce! I can’t count the number of dollars I’ve thrown away from having my abundance of fruits or veggies go bad because of my picky eaters!
I don’t know if this will help you because I cook for 2, not 8, but my biggest saving has been to join a CSA– they deliver vegetables and fruit to a pickup point every week (some others do it to your door). The produce itself isn’t *that* cheap, but it’s amazing how, when the “must be fresh” stuff replenishes itself, you can be creative and use everything else in your pantry to go with it. Fewer trips= fewer impulsive buys= less waste.
I use grocerygame.com for all my grocery shopping each week. A very inexpensive membership at grocerygame has saved me over $400 in the last 6 weeks alone in groceries.
It’s simple. Grocerygame provides you with a list of advertised and unadvertised sales in your area, then compares them to the local coupons in the paper, and tells you how to get the best deal! It’s so easy.
Don’t buy prepackaged kids snacks in the cute little bags. It’s much less expensive to buy one box of crackers and divide them into smaller snack bags.
I like to shop less often and buy in bulk! I’ve found that when you shop less often, you’ll end up buying less spur of the moment items that you really didn’t need and you’ll also save time. I make a master shopping list of all the things I normally purchase, grouping like products together as to their isle in the store, then use a highlighter to mark the items I’m running low on. This makes it easy to spot at a glance what I need as I shop. I buy the larger sizes of anything that keeps well, staples like flour, sugar, pasta, rice, etc it’s usually less expensive. Plus I stock up on canned goods when they are on sale. I like to keep my pantry and freezer well stocked
I am overly organized (it helps with two small children!). I use grocery list generator (you can find it online as a plug in for Mozilla), and have put all my most common recipes along with the ingredients that they require into it. Once every two weeks, I choose the number of meals that I need (for me, it’s eight…we do leftovers and eat at the in-laws a few times a week, plus one guilty take away night). I generate a list based on those meals, plus the staples that we’re out of (toilet paper, milk, etc), and only buy those items at the grocery store. If I have extra time (Ha!), I use the sale fliers from the grocery store to plan the meals (chicken breasts are on sale, so we have a few meals based on those). This has saved me huge amounts of time and money! No more wandering up and down the aisles, looking for inspiration from the god of recipes. You have to be a bit organized to begin with, but after that it makes life way easier. No more wondering what is for dinner. I stick a list of the meals that I have purchased ingredients for up on the fridge, and when it’s time to think about dinner, I go and see what the choices are.
Oh yes…and I should have mentioned…before I used grocery list generator, I just had an Excel spreadsheet. One list of recipes and ingredients, and one standard shopping list with everything that we ever buy on it. I would just put the list up on the bulletin board and highlight things as we ran out. When shopping time came around, I took it down, went through the recipes, added the items that we needed for those recipes, and off I went!
Call or visit all of the grocery stores in your area to learn their policies regarding coupons and price matching. Some stores will match advertised prices from competitors. Some stores will double (or even triple coupons. Some stores will accept competitor’s coupons or expired coupons.
If you can find a store that will price match and at least doubles coupons (make sure you know what amount they double up to), then you’ve hit the jackpot because you can get the “sale” prices of all the local stores at one store using the price matching.
Save up your coupons and try to only use the coupons when an item is on sale to maximize your savings. If there are items that you buy regularly, especially if they are non-perishable, use a servce such as thecouponclippers.com or thegrocerygame.com to order more coupons by mail for your favorite items.
Last, but not lease, there are lots of great resources on the web for low-cost/frugal recipes. One great one is hillbillyhousewife.com Learn to cook more items from scratch that packaged to reap more savings.
My grocery tip is pretty basic, but it is effective.
Start getting your local Sunday paper and save all the coupons (I usually buy 2). I prefer not to cut them out until I know I will actually use them, so put them in a folder and organize them by date.
Get all your local grocery flyer’s (you can also look them up online) and mark down everything on sale that week that interests you by location and price.
Refer back to your coupons and cut out the ones that apply to your shopping list.
I will hit several grocery store on the same day to get all the sale items. In my case, the store are all next to one another so this is no big deal.
Pay special attention to stores with buy 1 get 1 free items, and try to get more coupons for these items as you can use 2 coupons for the B1G1 items, even though you are only really buying one. These are the best savings I find.
I also have purchased coupons on ebay for items that I buy weekly.
Also take the coupons in the little machines and store them in your folder. These items almost always go on sale after they remove those dispensers.
There’s a simple thing I do that saves me money every time I shop, and helps curb those impulse purchases.
Before I check out, I look in my cart. This is the time to rethink what I am purchasing and ask myself on whether we really need it. The Little Debbie snack cakes (which looked really good when I went down the aisle), don’t always look so good by the end of the trip.
Whenever I feel the need to save money on groceries we eat beans! Have you ever looked at the price of dry beans? Usually under a dollar a bag! A bag of beans can feed my husband and I for almost a week. Not to mention they’re one of the healthiest foods you can eat. So I’m saving money on groceries and potential health problems down the road. And there’s no need to clip coupons or keep a list. Just buy whatever kind of beans you’d like to eat this week. We often have a “bean week” once a month. In the winter its various bean soups, in the summer it’s beans & rice. Give beans a try!