Grocery Buying Tips

We live on a $130 per month budget for groceries. How do we do it? Here are some things I do that help cut down the grocery expenses.

1. I plan my meals for the week before I go shopping. I am only allowed 32.50 per week for all of our groceries. I usually plan and buy for 5 dinners per week. The other two days we just eat leftovers. All of the dinner recipes I will be posting on this blog will cost around $5 dollars or less to prepare. We do not eat a whole lot of fresh produce unless it is on a way good sale. I will usually buy frozen veggies and canned fruit. Before I go shopping, I check grocerysmarts.com.



Grocerysmarts.com is an amazing tool for checking out weekly grocery deals. I mostly use this to check on produce and meat deals for the week. I will mostly only buy the items that I need which has the word "Extreme" next to it. It is way nice too because it lists the grocery deals by store.

2. We do not buy processed food like cereal, crackers, chips, pre-made chicken nuggets, corn dogs, Hot Pockets  ect. These items will really rack up your grocery bill fast. I stick to the basics when I go shopping and basically everything we eat is homemade. Because we do not have cereal for breakfast, I make inexpensive breakfast cassroles, my own pancake mix, and fruit-oatmeal bakes (recipes to come soon.)

3. I try to go shopping by myself and will not buy anything that is not on my list. When I bring other people with me, I tend to get sucked into buying items that I did not originally intend to buy. I go by myself and stick to my list.

4. I know where to shop. The majority of my shopping is done at Smiths because they tend to have great sales and I like the rewards points earned from being a fresh values customer. There are some items though that can be purchased cheaper elsewhere. Yeast, flour, sugar, and sometimes cheese are cheapest at Costco or Sam's Club. You can buy a 25 lb bag of flour at Sam's for just $7.67. The yeast and sugar are also great deals.

5. We stock up on staples at good prices. When you have mass amounts of everything, you don't need to go to the store as often and when you don't go to the store, you don't spend money. We stock up on yeast, flour, sugar, cheese (at Sam's), canned spaghetti sauce, canned vegetables, and canned fruit. I buy about 4 gallons of milk at a time, freeze them, and bring a gallon out as we need it. Because we have this food stored up, we can sometimes go even 2 weeks without going to the store if needed. You may have to build your storage up slowly to make it fit in your budget (flour one month, tomato sauce the next ect.)