Grocery shopping 101

Posted on | March 1, 2009 | No Comments

Successfully shopping on a budget takes a little patience. You need to learn a whole new way to shop. You can’t just go to the grocery store and put whatever you want in your cart. You need to shop based on coupons and the sales of the week.

For those of you who are just starting to use coupons I want to take a minute to go over the basics. It may seem overwhelming at first, but you will quickly catch on and be a pro before you know it. Almost every Sunday (sometimes Saturday if you get the paper delivered) your newspaper has different inserts with coupons. These are usually SmartSource, Red Plum, or a specific manufacturer like Proctor & Gamble or General Mills. You may want to pick up more then one paper for multiple coupon inserts to maximize your savings, especially if the store you shop at has buy one get one free sales.

I’ll use an example that I just did. My store has Ken’s Marinade (KM) on sale this week. The price is $2.80 and the item is buy one get one free. So I can get 2 bottles of the KM for $2.80, which is $1.40 each bottle. Now a few weeks ago my coupon insert had a $1.00 off one KM coupon. If I only had one paper, therefore one coupon I could use, the price would become $1.80 for 2 bottles of Ken’s. I bought multiple papers, so I have multiple coupons. I can use one coupon for each item purchased, so now it would be $2.80 for 2 bottles of KM, less $1.00 coupon, less another $1.00 coupon. My final cost would be $0.80 for 2 bottles. Without coupons and deals I would have paid $2.80, but I was able to get it for $0.40 a bottle. That’s a huge savings.

Once you start getting coupons you need to organize them. How you organize your coupons is up to you. When we bloggers show you the deals we tell you where we get the coupons from. So if you want to do a deal that I post using coupons from the 4/22 Smart Source insert, you need to know where that coupon is.

Some people leave the coupon inserts whole and just label them. Then they cut the coupons when needed. I used to cut the coupons and sort them by category and file them in a binder so I could find them based on what they were. For me that was too much work, so now I use an envelope system. The most important thing is to organize them in a way so you know how to find your coupons.

Every week you need to get the circulars from your stores. You plan your shopping and meals around the sales and coupons. If meat is on sale one week, you buy it and plan your menu around it. I’m not saying that you have to eat something just because it’s on sale, you just use the sales to buy what you use. Once you make a list from the sales flier, you check your coupons and see what you can match up. You can easily and quickly learn to save 40% or more.

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