Now for “place to save #1”… groceries!
I used to go to the grocery store, most times without a list or menu, and just buy whatever I saw. I would buy stuff on sale, buy according to my taste at the moment, hopefully remembering all the things that we actually needed and try to make the best purchase from the shelf and/or advertised price. I didn’t shop the ads, I didn’t use coupons… I just went and spent. most times I would shop our local “super” store (I use that term VERY loosely) and wind up spending about $150-$200 per week. Normally I would spend on the higher side of the scale.
Then reality struck! I lost my job, our income was divided by half. We had a new baby, one in day care, a house and all the bills that entails, two cars and wow… I was overwhelmed. Where could I cut costs? What could I do to make things last longer? Where could I find cheaper alternatives? Where could I find solutions that would work for us and make a noticeable difference in our “bottom line”? I started reading blogs. I read as much as I could and took it all in. Since I wasn’t working I was able to jump in with both feet, head first and take it all on!
I didn’t want to spend the extra money on a coupon book (saving everywhere I could) so I used a plastic shoe box filled with envelopes. I tore the flaps off the envelopes and wrote on the front of the envelope which category it held. This was great as the options were limitless. I could add different categories as I went without disrupting the system I was using. Example… I had “cleaning products” as one of my categories… this section got huge so I divided it into subsections of the cleaning category: bathroom, floors, laundry, kits (meaning the cleaning kit stuff like Swiffer), “Smelly Stuff” (like glade and airwick air freshener). the possibilities went on and on.
It was great and worked very well for me. I put a blank envelope in the front of the box and this is where I put the coupons I was using that trip as I went along on my shopping. I also kept a pen in there for marking off my list and an envelope in the back where I stored my receipts so I could track my spending and savings. I had different envelopes for various stores with a list of what to get from that store. I had one for Walgreens where I would print out the match ups from someone else’s blog (let them do the work) and then wrote down what I was getting and paper clipped the coupon to the list to make it easier. If I was doing more than one transaction per trip I would make multiple lists and clip the coupons to that specific list.
OK, now on to how I started with the grocery shopping… Like I said I dove in head first, both feet, yadda yadda yadda. I didn’t even set a budget and just tried to see how much I could save regardless of how much I was spending. I saved a ton, but I also spent more than I should have. I should have set a budget. After doing this for a month I realized that I really wasn’t saving that much money because I didn’t have a budget. So, after much debate with myself I set my budget at $40 per week for groceries, cleaning products, laundry stuff, etc. This was going to be a challenge! Was I up for it??
YES I WAS!! OK, how am I going to do this was my biggest concern, but considering I had a ton of time on my hands I decided that I would have to do it. I would make myself do it. I figured we would barely be scraping by, eating tasteless stuff for dinner and just figured it would be impossible especially with me and the girls always being home for every meal. Well, I was pleasantly surprised. I planned our dinners out for the week and made sure we had stuff on hand for breakfast and lunches (leftovers too) and did quite well. We ate very well and I started to cook a bunch of stuff instead of buying conveniently packaged stuff like granola bars!
So, let’s look at what I was spending versus my new budget… I was spending, let’s average it at $180 per week and now I budgeted to $40, so that’s a savings of $140 per week… which comes out to $606.66 per month! Could you imagine had I been doing this for the year prior to being “forced” to do coupon shopping. That would have been a savings of $7,280.00! Now, you can’t tell me that’s not worth clipping coupons each week.
Next, other “others”!!
No comments:
Post a Comment