Eating takes a big bite out of our budgets. Let’s start there for everyone needs to eat. There are people who live to eat and people who eat to live.
Coupons and sales are a good way to get good stuff cheap. Think of coupons as currency. Now I don't bend over to pick up a penny for I could throw my back out, but I will stoop for a dollar.
I don’t often use store brands unless I know who produces the product and it’s hard to know who produces the product unless you ask and then often times no one at the store seems to know who packages their no name beans. I like the real thing. Maybe I am fooling myself but I found often times there is a difference.
Start with investing in a book I found, Greatest Secrets of the Coupon Mom by Stephanie Nelson, $14.03 on Amazon
Use the Coupon Mom’s webpage for extra help. Get yourself a notebook and keep track of what your family eats and uses. Then track the sales for many are cyclical. We like premium ice cream in our house and I never pay full price for Ben& Jerry’s or Haagen Dazs. When it’s on sale I buy enough for a couple of months (in reality it never lasts that long). And then it’s on sale again 6-8 weeks later. I also found Target and Wal-Mart sell it at deep discount.
Start collecting your coupons and use a coupon organizer to make finding them easy. I actually leave my coupons in the car so they are always available. You can get coupons online, on product packaging, from the newspaper or in the store itself.
I know you are thinking I don’t have time for this, but once you set up a system it will not take much time and if you can save 25% or more on groceries that will add up in a year. With a $5,000 annual food budget that’s $1,250.
Consider joining one of the warehouse clubs. They work well if you have a large family. And this time of year the local produce is cheaper at the farm stands and fresher than anything you can get in the stores.
When my children were younger I belonged to a food co-op and had to volunteer to pack and deliver. But the savings were tremendous especially for specialty items like cheeses. I also buy my eggs locally which are a bit cheaper and a whole lot fresher.
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