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How do you make your food cost expenses go further?
On 1 Jun 2004 19:20:46 -0700, (Pat) wrote:
>What are the best tips you've ever read and been recommended so far
>and also regularly practice, relating to how your family has made and
>regularly makes it's money go a lot further than it ever used to, when
>it comes to all your weekly food - drink purchases / expenses, if you
>have a family to look after, or when you did.
There are several things we do that make a big difference.
We created storage space by building an inexpensive shelving unit made to
fit our living situation that increased our storage capacity a large
amount. Before we had this, we used other closets in the house for storing
foods we bought large quantities of.
We buy things in bulk as much as we can, we only go grocery shopping every
two weeks and we shop from a list sorted by aisle. If I need something
fresh for a particular meal, I might stop at the store between trips, but I
ONLY buy the one thing I need and I go in and get back out again.
We buy up to the limit on items that are on deep discount (that we USE),
sometimes twice the limit and go through the line twice (because there are
two of us), depending on what the item is and how steep the discount is.
We stay away from brand name items on things where it doesn't matter enough
to be worth the extra cost (for instance, I find that brand name soups just
taste better to me and I'm going to actually eat them, whereas off brand
soups just don't taste good and aren't worth the few cents I save when I
end up not eating them and eventually giving them to a food shelf).
We also invested in a used freezer and made space for it in our apartment
(this was when we lived in Alaska on a shoe string). That way we could take
advantage of deep discounts on meats, or fish from our fisherman friends,
and freeze them. This freezer paid for itself in food savings within a
couple of months.
We went through both large supermarkets here with a list of the items we
keep on hand at all times (which is an extensive list, I like variety) and
we figured out which stores had the best prices on which items. In that way
we created two standard shopping lists (I can try to put them up here if
anyone's interested in seeing what I mean). Every other Thursday night we
go over the list and check the things we need. Then Friday night after work
we get dinner out (usually fast food), then, lists in hand (we actually
keep them in ListMaker on my husband's Palm Pilot), we go to each store in
turn, and sit down for a minute to go through the circular. We add items
to the list that are on sale, or note the sale price for items we were
already going to get.
And this is the most important part, we go from item to item on the list,
and only go into aisles that have things we need in them. We don't usually
browse, and we don't go down every aisle. There are times when I might
dawdle, or be trying to remember something that I wanted but didn't get on
the list, but most of the time this saves a lot on impulse purchases.
Grocery stores are set up to get you to browse, to impulse buy, and to
suddenly see things you "need" when you're going to get the basics. By
going item to item, you reduce the chances of this happening, and end up
getting what you came in to get, not what they're trying to sell you this
week.
We also use coupons that are on things we would be normally buying, but
don't go out of our way to use coupons on things we wouldn't be buying.
When there's a limit, we'll go out of our way to buy as many more as we can
by going into the store several times, if the item is something we'll
definately use (like pepperoni).
All in all, these measures have saved us a great deal of money and time
over the years, and I always have enough food in the house that we could go
at least one month without having to repeat many meals, and much much
longer if I'm willing to be more skimpy on the meals. So if anything
happened and we couldn't get paid for a three months, we'd still be able to
eat.
--
Siobhan Perricone
"This isn't right. This isn't even wrong."
- Wolfgang Pauli, on a paper submitted by a physicist colleague
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