Grocery Shopping On a Budget

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!!