The grocery bill is a popular place to attack overspending—and at $900 a month spent on groceries and restaurants for just 2 people, our grocery bill deserved to be attacked.
It’s been about 2 months, so I’m still very much a beginner at this, but we’ve chopped our food expenses in half. $300 is the food budget for May and I’m fairly sure we’ll pull it off.
Here’s what has worked for us so far:
1. Have a Plan! This is by far the most important part of grocery store strategy. There are 21 meals in a week, plus snacks—what will you eat? At minimum, you should have a plan for dinner. (The books Saving Dinner and Saving Dinner the Vegetarian Way are a great help if you’re clueless, and the recipes are inexpensive, healthy and seasonal) You need a list, and you need to know what the foods on that list will cook. And then, you actually have to cook—more on that in a later post.
2. Loss Leaders, grocery store sale fliers, whatever you call them, they need to be right in front of you as you plan the week’s meals and your grocery list. This week, for example, Safeway’s sale flier had a coupon for a $1 carton of eggs and another for 4 lbs of Strawberries for $4, so I planned on two egg breakfasts and one omelet dinner—and I scrapped my idea to buy cherries ($2.97/lb) and went with strawberries instead.
3. Consider going to more than one grocery store. This one is easy for us, because Mister actually works at a grocery store, but I think other people can probably swing it too. It goes like this: While looking at the sales you’ll see that if you bought from the best sales at 2-3 different stores, you’d seriously trim your grocery budget and still get a lot of variety. I’m still figuring out the best stores to shop at and when—it will likely depend on the sales each week and what we want to eat.
Some considerations in our case: our local King Soopers doubles coupons up to $.50 and is on my way home from work—no extra transport to get there so it’s easy to stop and grab the best deals. Sunflower Farmer’s Market (our version of Trader Joe’s) has organic and natural food and ridiculously low sale prices on some items—Wednesday is the day to shop there because it’s the day when last week’s and next week’s sales overlap—double savings! There’s definitely a balance between convenience and savings with this tip—you’ll never catch us driving across town to catch some deep discounts on kitty litter and pudding snacks, but I’m finding that 2 small trips to different stores is doable and helpful. (Caveat: The multiple stores tip only works if you have a real list and stick to it—if you don’t, you’ll likely end up spending more because of all the little extras you throw into the cart on each trip.)
4. Coupons. I’ll have more on this one later, but coupons can be fun! I use them only when the item is already on sale and it’s a product we definitely use. Toiletries and laundry detergent are a great place to start because there are so many coupons for these items and you get a chance to compare the best deals. I still haven’t figured out how to organize them properly and I’m very much a beginner, but I’m saving at least $12-15 a week by using coupons.
5. Try The Grocery Game—I’m not totally “sold” on this service, but I think it can be good for people who are coupon newbies. My first week with them I was amazed at the deals, but even by week two I was figuring out deals that The Grocery Game missed. Also, I’m fairly sure that GG lists are chosen based on highest % discounts, so the list might instruct you to go for a great deal on asparagus (60% off!!) when it would be cheaper to get the broccoli at 20% off. Still, it makes saving money fast and easy and time is one of the bigger obstacles for people trying to save money at the supermarket. In other words, you shouldn’t trust the list blindly—but the $1 4-week trial is definitely worth it if you have no clue where to start with coupons and supermarket sales.
Ok, that should do it for now…got any tips I should add? I’m still new at this and looking to learn!
