Saving Money on Food

Leave your credit card and checkbook at home and only buy groceries with cash. This will force you to shop carefully and prevent overspending.

Take along a calculator, if needed, to add up your purchases and prevent going over your cash limit. One way to do this is to always round up the cost of each item to the nearest 50 cents or dollar. This way you will leave yourself a cushion, which you can put into a savings jar or use for a treat at the end of your shopping trip.




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A hungry belly will influence you to spend more money. Everything in the store will look good and your stomach will overrule your brain in making decisions.

Likewise, if you are exhausted you will not be making the best decisions. Go grocery shopping when you are well-rested and well-fed to save the most money.

Stretching out the time between between shopping trips forces you to make do with what you have in the house. It saves the gas you would have spent driving to and from the store. It also saves all the additional money we all tend to spend everytime we set foot in the grocery store? Ever run in for a gallon of milk and a loaf of bread, and come out 20 minutes later with fifty dollars worth of additional stuff you forgot you "needed"? Yes, that's how they get you! So save money by staying out of the store as much as you can.

This is one of the many games I play with myself to save more money. I try to stretch out time between trips to the store as long as I can. I challenge myself to make this time span longer and longer. You can't spend the money if you don't go to the store!

These are not places where you are going to find any grocery bargains anyway. You are more likely to buy costly junk foods in convenience stores, and the products in specialty stores are very expensive.

Bread outlets are great places to save a lot of money on bakery items. I have been buying bread for my family at the Sara Lee Outlet near my home for more than seven years and figured out that I have saved several thousands of dollars in that period of time simply by buying our bread there.

My daughter likes a particular brand of bread that they sell at this outlet everyday for 65 cents a loaf. Most of the time they have a special on this bread and sell it two loaves for a dollar. I am happy to stock up on this bread and put it in the freezer when it is 50 cents a loaf, because it sells for almost $3.00 a loaf at the grocery store in my neighborhood. That is a pretty big savings when you consider that at one point when my girls were younger, we were going through a loaf of bread a day!

I like whole grain breads that sell for about $4.50 at the grocery, but at the bread outlet I can buy these for $1.85. They even have fresh loaves for around $2.50. Not everything at the outlet is short dated.

The outlet store has a lot of non-bread items as well. I can get chips for $2.00 a bag, jars of peanut butter for $1.50, and Little Debbie cakes for 89 cents a box. After Thanksgiving they sell bags of stuffing, packages of dinner rolls and canned pumpkin for 50 cents each. You never know for sure what you will find there. It is definitely worthwhile to try to find a place like this to shop!





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Bringing children along will result in a higher grocery bill. I know for myself, I cannot concentrate on finding the best buys with little hands tugging on me, little mouths begging me to buy this or that or simply hollering to go home! While I am trying to compare prices on canned tomatoes, little Janie is blocking traffic while doing her spinning dance in the middle of the aisle, while Bobby Junior is helping out by loading up my cart from the display of Mrs. Megabucks Gourmet Barbecue Flavoring.

My personal opinion is that this also extends to husbands, who tend to load the grocery cart with their favorite snack foods and expensive cuts of meat. Not all men are poor shoppers, but this has been my experience and seems to be shared with many women who say they spend more at the grocery when their spouse comes along.





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The best deals are to be found along the outside walls of the store, in the produce, meats and dairy sections. That is because here the items are in their whole forms.

On the interior aisles you will find more processed foods. Someone has already done some or all of the preparation for you. You will pay more for that preparation than if you bought the raw ingredients and prepared it yourself.

Cook from scratch and save!

Every week the store marks some items way down to attract buyers. These are generally the items advertised on the front page of their sales circular. When these items are marked down low, this is the time to stock up. Buy as much as you can use, store or freeze; but, do not buy more than you will use.

If you watch your store ads, you will start to notice there is a pattern to when things go on sale. Usually if chicken is on sale, if you wait six or eight weeks chicken will be on sale again. Figure out how the cycle works at your local store, then plan your shopping accordingly.

Watch for other prices to be raised to make up for the loss leaders. If roast is on sale, are the potatoes marked up? When they mark bacon down, did they mark the eggs up? Try to plan your purchases so that you stock up on the related items when they are on sale too, so you do not end up spending all of your savings buying the things that go with the loss leader!

Many generic or store brands are identical, or nearly so, to the name brands next to them on the shelf. Usually they are made in the same factory. One day they put the advertised label on the product and the next day they apply the store brand label.

My high school home economics teacher challenged us all to go home and arrange for blind taste tests to see if our families could tell the difference between the advertised brand and the store brands or generics. In some cases there was a difference in quality or taste, but in many cases people could not tell the difference and around fifty percent of the time they thought the store brand or generic brand product was the name brand.

If your family cannot tell the difference between the store brand and the name brand product, why spend the extra money?

What if your family insists upon the name brand product? I know more than one mom who brings home store brand cereal and puts the inner bags into the name brand cereal box she keeps recycling for this purpose. The kids cannot tell the difference and since they get to look at the advertised box at the breakfast table, they are happy.