Hey everyone, these are my simple tips on how to take home a ton of groceries for a very minimal amount of money. If you are frugal and thrifty like me, you know it's important to save money on groceries. Grocery shopping on a budget will give you some tips on how to save you money on all of your grocery shopping needs.Food is a necessity, so it needs to be affordable. Like I told you in my other article, you need to do your research and get some coupons for your groceries. There are a couple of sources for this. You need to get the sales ads from all of your local grocery and drug stores, print out coupons from the Internet, cut out coupons from your local paper, and see if any of your grocery stores have coupons that you can load onto your shoppers reward card from your computer. I'll take you through all of the steps then really show you how to make it come together!!
The first thing you need to do is get all of the local grocery store ads together. This includes grocery stores, big box stores, and drug stores. You can usually go to the stores website and view the current ad if you don't have a copy of one. The first thing you want to do is compare the ads. Look at the cost of the same item at different stores, i.e. milk may be $2.29/gallon at one store and $3.19/gallon at another. Don't assume that this store will always have the best price. They may be selling bread for .99 and the store with the more expensive milk may have bread for .74. So compare every thing that you have on your grocery list to see who has the best prices on what. The next thing you want to look at is the stores coupon acceptance policy. Every store is different, so find out the facts. A few things to look at, do they double coupons, if so up to what amount, do they take printable coupons, and do they have a limit on coupons/transaction. If you want to succeed, you need to know these things.
Once you've got all of your ads sorted out, you want to start looking for coupons on the Internet. There are a lot of great coupon websites out there that are completely free to use. Take your ads, and only print the coupons that match things you have circled in the ads, or things that you know you need anyways. Go to a bunch of different websites to see who has the best deals, and don't forget to go to the manufacturers website, they may have coupons as well. If you make sure that the sale in the store and your coupons match, you're doing well.
The next thing you need to do is clip the coupons from your local newspaper. This is vital!! You can usually find great coupons in here that when combined with the sales ads will make your grocery bill drop significantly. Manufacturers want you to buy their products over the competitions, so they usually partner with local grocery stores and newspapers to make sure that their product is the best deal. Once you get all of these coupons printed and clipped, you need to organize them, I strongly recommend getting a coupon organizer. Set it up however it makes sense to you, what works for me is by category, i.e. dairy, sweets, baking, toiletries, paper products, restaurants, etc. I also recommend sorting the coupons into separate envelopes for your shopping trip. Put the ad, your grocery list, and your coupons for each store into a separate envelope, this will save you a lot of time in the store.
One of my favorite things to do is load coupons onto my shopper card. The reason this is one of my favorites is because you can combine your printed coupons and your loaded coupons to really double it up. Let me walk you through an example. Let's say a store has pizza rolls on sale for 2 for $5. You have two coupons for .55 off one (HINT:if it's a printable coupon, you might be able to get two by going to multiple websites.). You have loaded a coupon onto your shoppers card for .75 off two. This store offers double coupons up to .55. So you are saving... $2.95 off making your final cost $1.02 per bag of pizza rolls, that is an awesome deal considering they were on sale for $2.50 per bag. This is just an example, there are so many possibilities out there, it is up to you to discover them.
If you take all of these steps and put them together every time you shop, you will be completely amazed at the amount of money you were over spending on groceries. I'm not going to lie to you, this isn't very quick and easy to start out, but once you get the hang of it, you'll be doing it with your eyes closed. Trust me, I have 3 kids and a part-time job, but I find time every two weeks to make sure when we go out grocery shopping we are getting the most for our money. I usually try to do it after the kids go to sleep for about thirty min so I can stay on top of it. One last tip and then the info is all yours, when you go shopping, stick to your list and drive to the stores in a circular order so you save gas. Have fun clipping coupons and saving money!!
Thursday, April 30, 2009
A Mom's Tips on How to Save Money
Hi and welcome to my blog. I am a mother of three who is constantly trying to stay on top of everything. When my husband and I had our second child we really started to get concerned about our spending habits. When we just had one child, saving money was not always that important to us, we just spoiled him rotten and did what we wanted. However, with being out of work for 12 weeks, and bills still coming, we had to get thrifty. These are just a few of the things we decided to try out to save money. We evaluated our spending habits, set up a budget on our computer, signed up for coupons and freebies, and learned how to cook. I know it sounds simple, but we went from being behind all the time, to managing our bills consistently and even setting money aside for the kids for college someday.
The first thing we did was evaluate our spending habits. We set up a spreadsheet on our computer, we have Works and it came as an option. We then made sure that every time we spent money, we logged it on to our spreadsheet. This was the eyeopener for us!!! Every time we went grocery shopping, we spent at least $5 to $10 on things to keep our son behaving!! We also were spending close to $30 a week on coffee. We were spending $90 a week on eating out. The list goes on and on. These are things we did everyday without thinking about it, so at the end of the week, it was like, where did the money go?
Once we knew why we were blowing through our money so fast, we set up a budget calculator spreadsheet on our computer, it was very easy. Most programs have one of these available, but you can purchase more advanced ones if you run your own business and have more things to calculate. We put all of our monthly target numbers in for our income and expenses, then each time we got a paycheck, earned tips, or babysat to earn money, we plugged that into our income column. We then made sure that when we paid our bills all of those got logged into the spreadsheet correctly. And last but as we found out definitely not least, we logged every dollar that we spent on misc items, from coffee to eating out to groceries to movies, you name it, we plugged it in. Once we had a good grasp on where we were at financially, we began to look for other ways to save money besides just cutting back on the fun stuff.
We started looking around on the Internet for coupons and we were blown away by what we found. There are some really great coupon websites out there that let you print coupons from your own computer. A few of my favorite are couponcabin.com , flamingoworld.com , walgreens.com , and kroger.com . Almost everyone knows this now, but 3 years ago, we were in the dark. I had never used a coupon in my life, now I won't shop without one. There are websites designed for grocery coupons, retail coupons, dining coupons, etc. all absolutely free to you!! You just have to sign up your e-mail address and start printing. Word to the wise though, save trees if you won't use it, don't print it. Check out my other article entitled " Grocery Shopping On a Budget " to see how to really make these coupons work for you. Another thing you can look for is free samples. If you go to a company's direct website you can usually find a link to try a new product for free or get a mail in rebate that will make the product free. This takes a little more time, but if you're on a tight budget and trying to find ways to save a ton of money, this is a great tip!! You can get free samples of everything from baby formula to diapers to food to toiletries. Give it a try!!
Lastly, we learned how to cook. I know that sounds ridiculous, but if you're on a budget and you only know how to make 5 or 6 things, you get really tired of them. Again, you don't have to spend money to do this. We did 3 simple things and it turned out great!! The first thing we did was ask our parents and grandparents for recipes. We got a whole boatload of good ideas from them. The next thing we did was search the Internet for recipes. We had the best luck with finding simple, affordable meal ideas from the local grocery store websites. The last thing we did was cut recipe ideas off of boxes and bags of food we had in our cupboards. Almost everything you buy, especially condiments, has some sort of recipe on it. Before we knew it, we were experimenting in the kitchen and making our own recipes.
So, to wrap it all up, saving money doesn't have to be hard. This is just the tip of the iceberg, there are so many options out there for people who are pinching their pennies. The biggest thing to remember is that you have to know where your money is going if you want to know how to save it. I hope these tips helped!!
The first thing we did was evaluate our spending habits. We set up a spreadsheet on our computer, we have Works and it came as an option. We then made sure that every time we spent money, we logged it on to our spreadsheet. This was the eyeopener for us!!! Every time we went grocery shopping, we spent at least $5 to $10 on things to keep our son behaving!! We also were spending close to $30 a week on coffee. We were spending $90 a week on eating out. The list goes on and on. These are things we did everyday without thinking about it, so at the end of the week, it was like, where did the money go?
Once we knew why we were blowing through our money so fast, we set up a budget calculator spreadsheet on our computer, it was very easy. Most programs have one of these available, but you can purchase more advanced ones if you run your own business and have more things to calculate. We put all of our monthly target numbers in for our income and expenses, then each time we got a paycheck, earned tips, or babysat to earn money, we plugged that into our income column. We then made sure that when we paid our bills all of those got logged into the spreadsheet correctly. And last but as we found out definitely not least, we logged every dollar that we spent on misc items, from coffee to eating out to groceries to movies, you name it, we plugged it in. Once we had a good grasp on where we were at financially, we began to look for other ways to save money besides just cutting back on the fun stuff.
We started looking around on the Internet for coupons and we were blown away by what we found. There are some really great coupon websites out there that let you print coupons from your own computer. A few of my favorite are couponcabin.com , flamingoworld.com , walgreens.com , and kroger.com . Almost everyone knows this now, but 3 years ago, we were in the dark. I had never used a coupon in my life, now I won't shop without one. There are websites designed for grocery coupons, retail coupons, dining coupons, etc. all absolutely free to you!! You just have to sign up your e-mail address and start printing. Word to the wise though, save trees if you won't use it, don't print it. Check out my other article entitled " Grocery Shopping On a Budget " to see how to really make these coupons work for you. Another thing you can look for is free samples. If you go to a company's direct website you can usually find a link to try a new product for free or get a mail in rebate that will make the product free. This takes a little more time, but if you're on a tight budget and trying to find ways to save a ton of money, this is a great tip!! You can get free samples of everything from baby formula to diapers to food to toiletries. Give it a try!!
Lastly, we learned how to cook. I know that sounds ridiculous, but if you're on a budget and you only know how to make 5 or 6 things, you get really tired of them. Again, you don't have to spend money to do this. We did 3 simple things and it turned out great!! The first thing we did was ask our parents and grandparents for recipes. We got a whole boatload of good ideas from them. The next thing we did was search the Internet for recipes. We had the best luck with finding simple, affordable meal ideas from the local grocery store websites. The last thing we did was cut recipe ideas off of boxes and bags of food we had in our cupboards. Almost everything you buy, especially condiments, has some sort of recipe on it. Before we knew it, we were experimenting in the kitchen and making our own recipes.
So, to wrap it all up, saving money doesn't have to be hard. This is just the tip of the iceberg, there are so many options out there for people who are pinching their pennies. The biggest thing to remember is that you have to know where your money is going if you want to know how to save it. I hope these tips helped!!
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