Food is probably one of the most fun areas for our family to spend money.  Whether it’s eating out, or buying snacks from the local grocery store, most people like to eat good food.  But whether it’s eating at home, at a restaurant, or eating healthy (as many families try to do), there is always an expense to consider.

As a side note, grocery stores are in a great business.  Everyone has to eat.  Everyone wants and needs to buy food at a convenient location near them.  And sooner or later, everyone is going to have to make a trip to the store for more.  If we don’t have a strategy or plan, the grocery store can pretty much steer us in the direction of the price they choose by strategically placing certain items on sale at just the right time of the year.

Consider these tips to cut your budget and control spending on food.

The food category

Make sure you know what’s included in the food category.  For example, many people get their budget off-track by including household items, toiletries, etc. in the food category.  If you’re doing this, you’re most likely not budgeting enough, or too much for food.  I recommend separating these other items into a miscellaneous category that can be tracked separately.

Identify eating out day(s)

Okay, so it’s obvious that many people blow their food budget by eating out all the time.  Eating out can also be seen as a form of entertainment and perhaps even be tracked separately, but since it’s such a large food expense for some people, we’ll mention it here.  How do you curtail this added expense, but still have some fun?

Pick eating out days of the week.  Perhaps every Friday, or Saturday can be eating out for dinner day.  Or, you can start family traditions of Saturday morning bagels at the local coffee shop.  You can enjoy a lot of valuable family experiences this way without busting your budget.

Take your lunch to work

It’s no secret eating out for lunch everyday costs money.  It costs a lot of money!  If you can eat out for $5 per day, please contact me and let me know where.  Most of the time, it costs a lot more.  But even at $5 per day, that’s $25 per week and $100 a month.  That amount of money could get you past the first $1000 in your emergency account in less than a year.  But, if you insist on eating out for networking or just for fun, pick 1-2 days per week as days in which you can eat out for lunch and make your lunch the other days.

Use coupons

Most people shy away from using coupons, but you can find a lot of good savings in your Sunday paper on good deals at the grocery store and eating out.  Make it a habit of clipping coupons to save a little extra each month.  The small amount of savings for each coupon can add up for the trip to the store and can really add up across the entire month.  If you’re able to save $10 per trip in coupons, you could potentially save close to $50 per month by using them.

Stockpile items

I recently wrote a free report: Guide to Playing The Grocery Game.  In this guide, I talk about how to play the game and how to use stockpiling and investment shopping as a technique to save money.  The Grocery Game also leverages the use of coupons for extra savings.  You can download a free copy when you sign up to receive my practical financial tips newsletter.

Shop with a plan

Grocery stores love when people enter their store without a plan.  When you enter the store without a plan, you’re susceptible to all of the items marked on sale and good grocery store advertising and marketing techniques.  Yes, as you’ll learn by Playing The Grocery Game, just because an item is on sale doesn’t mean it’s a good deal.

Shopping without a plan results in your emotions doing the shopping versus using your plan or shopping list.  So, make sure you prepare in advance of your trip and then work your plan while in the store.  Only deviate for items you forgot to include, or exceptional deals.

Don’t shop hungry

A few weeks ago, MyFinancialObjectives.com left a comment on a recent post with a great tip to not grocery shop while hungry.  Have you ever gone into the store with your plan in-hand, but with an empty stomach?  Everything in the store looks good, right?  Chances are you’re going to spend a lot more money when you’re hungry.  Eating a meal before you go will help.  Otherwise, grab a snack, so that you’re not feeding your appetite with your grocery spending.

Meal plan

Part of having a good grocery shopping plan is to plan out your meals.  If you don’t know what you’re going to eat for the week it’s difficult to determine what you’re going to have to purchase at the grocery store.  For those who like to cook extravagant recipes, be careful as all of the extra ingredients can add up in cost.  Try to keep meals simple and splurge on fancy recipes every now and then.

Meal share

I heard an interesting tip on a recent Crown MoneyLife podcast that is a pretty good idea for saving money on food.  If you like to entertain, or have people over to your house, consider sharing left over food with each other.  I know it sounds a little bit out there.  However, if you have 3-4 families from your neighborhood bring leftovers and share them, you can have a fun meal without extra spending and little preparation.

Coupon sharing sites

There are a number of collective buying power websites popping up out there that provide a coupon sharing service for people.  The service benefits people and stores or restaurants.  Just recently, we purchased a $20 pizza meal for $10 on Groupon and enjoyed an extra unplanned night out for the family because it was affordable and within our budget.  The deal is on if enough people sign up.  If not, the deal is off.  This insures the company is making enough to where the deal works for them and you get the discount.

What do you think of these saving money strategies for food?  Do you have any other ideas?

They told us how they were able to save hundreds of dollars per month on their grocery bill, but also have more groceries available to them in their home than they had ever had in the past. So, you can imagine our interest and excitement! And excited we were when our family started seeing over 50% savings on each trip to the grocery store.

If you’re like us, you know Grocery budgeting is challenging often costing much more than estimated, or robbing money from other budget categories. Knowing others face these challenges, we created a free report called: Guide to Playing the Grocery Game.

We’re convinced this report will help you learn how to play The Grocery Game and save money on your grocery spending. Saving money means you have more money to get out of debt, build an emergency savings fund, give and meet other important financial goals!

What’s included in the report?

The report is just over 4000 words and covers the below topics.

• Groceries are budget busters!
• The answer to saving money on groceries
• Requirements for playing
• So how much time does it require to play?
• What’s the underlying idea behind The Grocery Game?
• How do you know which items to purchase?
• Thoughts on couponing
• How much of each item should you purchase?
• Steps to play
• 10 tips critical for success
• Couponing tips
• File coupon ad inserts approach
• Coupon binder approach
• Pros to The Grocery Game
• Cons to The Grocery Game
• Which stores are on the list and how much does it cost?
• How do you sign up to play?
• Final thoughts
• Helpful links

How do you get a copy of the report?

Easy! The report is free when you sign up to receive the One Money Design Newsletter (also free).

Or, you can purchase the report if you’re not interested in the newsletter. Either way, we hope you’ll enjoy playing the game as much as we have and save money on your groceries!

Here’s a brief description from the Grocery Game website:

When you play, you’ll get a weekly list (called Teri’s List) of the lowest-priced products at your supermarket matched with manufacturers’ coupons and weekly specials — advertised and unadvertised. The Grocery Game does all the hard work and research, and presents it to you in a straightforward format.

Coupons are Essential to Grocery Savings

Unfortunately, as soon as you mention coupons, people lose interest.  Usually it’s because of the work and time that can sometimes be involved.

In fact, in a pretty good article this past week; Wise Bread gives you 7 ways to cut your food bill without using coupons.  I liked the article and included it in my round up post.  Here’s what the author said:

I’ll be honest, I like to clip coupons, but it’s not for everybody. It takes time to clip, sort, file, match, shop, then repeat week after week.

I certainly agree in that it does take time to cut coupons and sometimes more than I want to spend.  But, I still think coupons, which are an essential part of The Grocery Game, create big savings!

If you’re convinced, like us, you’ve probably tried a few coupon cliipping and filing techniques trying to find what works best and will save you the most time.   I think there are a few good approaches you can use.  And even if cutting coupons is intimidating and you’ve avoided doing it, read below before deciding to give up all that savings!

1.  The filing of coupon inserts approach to clipping and organizing coupons (this is the approach we use)

Keep in mind, our approach is in conjunction with playing the grocery game.  If you don’t play, cutting coupons is a lot more work.  Why?  The Grocery Game does the work for you in telling you which items are on sale and in which coupon insert to look for them (by date and type of insert).

We keep all of the coupon inserts from each Sunday paper (usually anywhere from 1–4) and file them away in file folders.  Each of the monthly folders has the coupon inserts organized by week.

When the weekly grocery list is produced by The Grocery Game we select the items we want to buy from the list.  We then proceed to finding the appropriate coupons in our coupon file.  Again, the Grocery Game list tells us which insert to look for the coupons.

Does this approach work?  Yes, it does.  It’s helpful because we don’t have to clip all the coupons when we first receive them in the paper and then file them by category.  You choose the items you want and only clip those coupons.

But  sometimes the challenging part comes with looking through the inserts to find the coupons.  And even though The Grocery Game tells us which insert to look in we sometimes make multiple passes through the pages to find the right one.   The more coupons we have to search for, the longer it takes, especially if we can’t find one on the initial pass.

The coupon binder is another approach I’ve found in some recent research.  We’re considering trying this out too to see which approach like better.

2.  The coupon binder approach to clipping and organizing coupons

I came across a video from KingdomFirstMom.com, who has done a good job in creating her coupon binder!  Check out the video where she provides a tour of the binder and tells us how it’s organized.  Then, meet me on the other side for some more discussion.

As you can see from the video, rather than immediately filing the inserts away in a monthly file like we do, she first clips the coupons from the inserts and then files them by category in her binder.  Yes, you have to look through the inserts and clip the coupons when you receive them, but the end result is having all of your like items together neatly organized.

By following this approach, you search for the coupon by category and item first and then narrow down your search by date.  I think this approach may produce a more organized end result and might allow you to take advantage of more than one coupon per product from past ads that haven’t expired.  There isn’t any way we could do this with our approach because it would require us to look through every coupon insert, for example, to find the toothpaste.

Final thoughts

I suppose you have to find the approach that works best for you.  Obviously, we’re looking for the one that saves the most time!  Personally, the more time I can save, the more time I can spend writing articles and doing other things I enjoy!

For now, we’ll keep on clipping, filling and playing The Grocery Game because we love the savings!

So, how about you, coupon clipper?  Do you have a method that works well?  Let us know in the comments what saves the most time and allows you to get the biggest savings!

Photo by sgrace’s photostream.

Grocery budgeting has always been a challenging area for us.  In the past, it’s never been easy to keep costs down.  Especially, with two little ones it can fluctuate quite a bit.

So you can imagine I was interested when I heard the excitement in my friends’ voices.  And excited I was when our family started seeing over 50% savings on grocery receipts.  We’ve saved hundreds of dollars over the past year playing, so I thought I would share what we’ve learned about The Grocery Game.

There is a lot of good information on the Grocery Game website, so this is not meant to be exhaustive, but hopefully, is a good start in getting you interested and wanting to learn more.

What is the concept behind The Grocery Game?

It’s simple.  Your food storage should look like your grandma’s food storage.  As a child visiting my grandma’s house, there never seemed to be a shortage of food in the freezer or pantry.  I think in general, past generations were more frugal.  They shopped best deals and made a lot of things at home that were preserved and stored.

Now I can tell you our family doesn’t have time to make our own food and store it, but we can stockpile.  Stockpiling is the fundamental concept of the game.  The game helps you buy items at rock bottom prices.  You buy more than you need at the present time and stockpile items.  When you run out of something at home you don’t go to the store to buy it.  After a while, you have a good stockpile to source your food from within your own pantry.

How does The Grocery Game work?

All items that can be bought in the grocery store go through sales cycles.  The Grocery Game catches these items in their sales cycle and helps you match them with coupons (the coupons are easy – keep reading for tips if you’re a coupon clipping hater) you find in your weekly newspaper.  The sales price along with the coupon allows you to purchase at the lowest price possible.  The prices are claimed by the Grocery Game to be cheaper than food club prices such as SAM’s and Costco and after our experience,  I agree.

Each week, we receive an online list for the stores we have chosen to shop at within our zip code.  The list has three types of items.  Blue items are the best sale prices.  Black items are on sale, but not at the lowest price.  The Green items are free.  A coupon coupled with a sales price sometimes makes it possible to get an item free.

Follow these steps to become effective at playing the game

Each Sunday, purchase two copies of your local paper.  There are grocery ads mixed in with all the sales ads.  Remove the grocery ads (you should have two copies of each ad) and write the date on the front of the ad.  Do this each week and file the ads in a file folder labeled by month.  There is no need to cut all of the coupons out of the sales ads.

1. Go to the Grocery Game online, retrieve and sort your list by color.
2. Review the blue items on the list (best prices) and select the items that you use or eat.  The list includes household and toiletry items as well.
3. Sort the list again to only show the items you selected and print it.
4. Review the list and find the ad and coupon date in your file (the list gives the appropriate ad and coupon date).  Look through your file folders, find the ads and clip your coupons.  Remember, you should have two coupons for each item since you have duplicate ad sections from purchasing two papers.  This approach helps you build your stockpile quicker.
5. Take your coupons and list and go grocery shopping!

10 tips we’ve found to be critical for success

1. You can get started now.  Don’t wait until you have a coupon inventory built up.  Some of the items on the list are for the current week’s ads.
2. Don’t try to stock pile more than 3 months worth of items.  Before I knew this rule we had enough shampoo to last a year.
3. File your ads in file folders with hanging files.  Since you’re writing the date on the each ad, you should be able to keep the ads in order of week within each monthly file folder for quick retrieval.
4. The lists are typically generated on Saturday night or Sunday morning.  Sales typically end when the stores close on Tuesday.  We’ve found it easiest to get everything together and go shopping on Sunday or Monday.
5. Don’t get too excited and buy things you wouldn’t normally eat or use.  A great deal may be tempting, but it’s not worth the money if you’re not going to use it.
6. Related to number one, you can start playing the game any time, but to have all the coupons that are on the list, it’s helpful to have 3 months worth of coupon ads in your file.  Don’t worry, it doesn’t take long and your saving money while getting your coupon ads.
7. You can pick one store for your list or multiple stores.  More than two stores will require a lot more time and energy each week.
8. Get a rain check.  You can get a rain check for items on sale, if the store has run out of stock and return next week to get your deal.
9. When getting started, read up on the forums.  You can learn a lot about stockpiling and others who’ve found success at the game.
10. Play consistently.  If you play the game each week, your trips to the grocery store should produce fewer items because you’re simply maintaining your stockpile.

Cost?  Here is the pricing plan directly from the Grocery Game website

After your optional* 4-week FREE Trial, TERI’S LIST is just $10 every 8 weeks for the first store LIST you choose, and $5 every 8 weeks for each additional store LIST (if more than one store LIST is available in your area).   Example:  1 store List: $10 every 8 weeks, 2 store Lists: $15 every 8 weeks, 3 store Lists: $20 every 8 weeks. Cancel anytime! All amounts are in US Dollars (USD). Canadian currency will automatically be converted to US Dollars by the payment processor.

Have you had any experience with the Grocery Game?  Please share your story and tips in the comments section.

If you decide to try out join the The Grocery Game, please consider including my email address, SaveOnGroceries@OneMoneyDesign.com, in the sign up form as a referral.