Grocery Shopping can really cut deep into a budget, but there are many ways that you can get around that and actually save money shopping. We manage to feed a family of 4 under $200 a month using simple shopping techniques. To shop on that little money for a family you will have to have meals planned and be organized.
We have a general plan of meals that we go by, we are flexible when we shop depending on what is on sale, it is not uncommon to shop at more than one store every week to get the best deals, and to save the most money. We are fortunate that we live close enough to several stores that we can do that without using much gas.
First thing that we do is pull out the sale ads. Sale ads will give us our menu for the week and allow us to plan for the best yet cheapest meals we can do. Some weeks we even splurge on steaks for everyone in the family. So with planning, you can eat healthy.
With the sale ads and our menu’s made, we then add on the list other things that we need. Since we budget for an average of $50 a week, we don’t usually buy snacks. We will buy stuff to make homemade cookies, cakes and other desserts.
We don’t stop with just the sales at the grocery stores, we then look online and look for matching coupons for the items that we found onsale. We only print the coupons that are for the items on sale. We have one store that will double the coupon value, so we usually get great deals on those items. You can print coupons right from your computer and the stores will take them saving you even more money.
Once we have our budgets, and our shopping lists then we go shopping without the children. We stick to the list, and using the coupons we eat good meals cheap. You can save money grocery shopping!
While it does take a little more time to plan the menus, and get the shopping lists, we compare ourselves to friends with the same number of kids, they spend over double what we do, and they don’t eat as healthy as us. So the hour or so it takes us to make out our menus and shopping list can be calculated into dollars. Even if we save $25 a week over the average family, that is $25 an hour that we consider to be “made” by spending that hour planning.
