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One of the biggest monthly expenses is food. Everyone has to eat and food costs money, right? As tough as this pill may be to swallow some months, there are some creative ways to fight back and save your hard-earned money.
Here are some tips to make your grocery budget go a lot further.
1. Plan your meals– You’ve heard the saying that failing to plan is planning to fail, right? Nothing has changed. Creating a meal plan each month is an important part of saving money and shopping smarter.
A meal plan ensures that the groceries you are buying line up with what is actually needed in your kitchen and it will help you not spent too much on take-out or last minute trips.
You may already think that restaurants are expensive. When you look at them from a calories-per-dollar standpoint, they are even worse. One meal may be a week’s worth of grocery money. Of course there are ways to eat out for cheaper, but take-out or dine-in still makes little financial sense. Even a few dollars per plate adds up when we’re talking about families of 4, 5, 6, or more people.
Crafting this meal plan doesn’t have to be hard. It can be done in a few minutes each week. Start by writing down a list of meals that your family enjoys for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Mix and match cheaper and more expensive meals. For example, toast for breakfast can balance out steak for dinner.
As you plan your meals, write down the ingredients you will need for each meal. Chances are good that you will need to purchase most of the ingredients, but some things may be stuff you have on-hand at all times like flour or sugar.
Here’s one of the most important parts– when you go to the store, stick to the list. Don’t get sidetracked by sales and extras that you don’t need. A few goodies here or there is fine, but too many snacks and one-off ingredients will kill your budget fast.
Sticking to the plan (that’s why we are planning, right?) will do wonders for your grocery budget.
Speaking of a list, how about making a list of cheap and easy meals? There’s nights where some buttered noodles and bread or beans and rice hit the spot. How many simple comfort meals can you come up with? I bet the per-portion cost is appealing!
2. Coupons and Rebates
If you know where to look, coupons and rebate programs can save you some money on every trip. Taking advantage of money-saving apps and programs will help you stay in your budget.
Back in the day, couponing meant flipping through newspapers and hoping for the best. Thankfully, things have come a long way from even ten or twenty years ago. Apps and the internet in general have made all of this much easier.
There are tons of apps to pick from but here are a few that I use with good results-
Ibotta
Fetch
Dosh
Coupons.com
Coupon Sherpa
Krazy Coupon Lady
3. Learn to Cook
This might be the ultimate money saver. Ingredients are a fraction of the cost of a dish when eating out or getting delivery. Cooking it yourself means cutting out the middle man restaurant- and a huge part of the usual bill for that kind of food. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying you can’t go to a restaurant or have a good time away from the kitchen. I’m just saying that you pay for that convenience and it’s disproportionately higher than the cost of the ingredients.
Here’s a question- when was the last time you went out or got delivery as a family and it was under $30/40/50? Did you sit there saying you could cook something almost as good for a fraction of the price? Well, you can. And it’s going to be significantly healthier as well.
4. Skip Processed Meals and Snacks
One of the worst grocery budget killers is stuff like snacks and processed meals. It absolutely kills me when I see a bag of chips for $5, knowing that it probably cost less than a dollar to make and get to the shelf. Ditto for that $10 frozen lasagna when I know how much more lasagna I can make for $10. I’m not the junk food police and don’t want to be. There’s plenty of snacks that I love, but I buy everything in moderation. The thought of clearing my accounts out over time due to a box of donuts is crazy. I hate knowing that people struggle to put food on the table because they don’t know any better.
Next time you go shopping, add up all the snacks and processed stuff and see how much you are spending on it. It’s going to be eye-opening.
5. Buy What is on Sale
Your grocery store is going to hate me for saying this, but a great way to save money is to only cherry-pick the stuff on sale. Grab the weekly ads and take a look at what is on sale that week. I use the sales to load up on meat. Once or twice a month, my local stores have deep discounts like 50% off or BOGO or even a B2GO.
A word of caution- learn your local prices. Some places call a given price a sale even when it is not below normal price and may still be higher than stores nearby. By knowing what things normally cost, you can better spot the fake sales that some stores love to swindle customers with.
If you buy the same things regularly to the point that you can memorize prices, more power to you. I can remember a fair number of items and their general prices. However, sometimes it helps to have a list of prices in the form of a cheat sheet, especially if you buy items that change frequently or simply have that many items to remember.
While we are talking about sales, let me mention something about membership warehouses. Some items are a great deal. Some items are not. And some items have what I call a reverse discount. I may not save money or get more overall, but I get a much better product for the same price. So the unit price is the same as elsewhere, but the quality is top-notch. It’s hard to say whether a membership will save you money overall. Our experience has been that any savings has been gobbled up by the total cost of the shopping trip there. It’s hard to get out of one of those places without spending $200. The good news is that the quantities should last you a while, meaning less trips. However, it still stings to spend $200+ at one store.
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