Frugal Grocery Shopping

Even before I started blogging on my own, I have been interested in reading other people's blogs.  The difficulty is that I am not interested in only one or two topics.  Which means I RSS feed to a LOT of blogs.  I try to eliminate blogs that I find aren't holding my interest, but it seems like my list of blogs still manages to expand.

So, in addition to the two pastors I admire (RLP & Reverb), I read about finances, politics, news, my friends, and most recently, frugal advice.

There is a whole population out there of people who know how to be thrifty!  And they were being thrifty long before it came back into style.

There are a lot of tips for frugality, but the biggest and most common seems to be how to save on your grocery bill, using coupons.  Now, I've tried to do the coupon thing before, and I failed miserably.  It required way more work than it was worth for the $1.50 savings at the end of my $150 shopping bill, so I didn't stick to it.  However, this is my biggest monthly expense (other than my mortgage), and the one expense I have some control over.

After reading the blogs of these self-proclaimed coupon queens, however, I realized I had gone about it all wrong.  There is a trick, a system, to making this work.  It's not about finding coupons for things you may or may not use, and using them when you need that product.  The trick is to collect the coupons for the items that you would definitely buy anyway, and stocking up when you can combine your coupon with an already marked down price.  These women scour their grocery advertisements for sales, then combine those sale prices with the best coupon to give you the biggest bang for your buck.  It's quite an art... or science!

Armed with this new knowledge, and a month's worth of coupon inserts, I sat down during nap time yesterday to sort through them all, and cut out the ones I could use.  With the number of inserts I had to go through, this process took a couple of hours.  After that, I needed to sort them into a system that would be usable in the store.  THAT took another hour or so.

I had several coupons that were due to expire tomorrow, so this morning I set out to do some shopping and price comparisons.  I started with Target because I've never shopped for food there, and I wanted to get an idea of their prices.  I ended up collecting a lot of information, and several good deals on non-grocery items.  I cut $27 off of my bill by combining coupons with sales there.

Then I moved on to Safeway, another store I rarely visit.  I had much better success here.  I saved $58 on this bill.  I also price shopped at Save-Mart, just to see who offered the best prices in town.  In addition to these stores, I have a Winco, Costco, Sam's Club, Raley's, and a BelAir in my vicinity.  These I've visited and have a pretty good idea, and plenty of receipts, to compare.

Altogether I cut a little less than 50% of my bill today.  None of it was for anything I would not have bought anyway, at some point.  The difference was that I really needed none of it right now, but by taking advantage of the sales, and stocking up, I probably bought them for a much better price than had I waited until I needed the items.

So, it looks like I'll need to invest in more shelving....  ;-)