5 Tips To Stay Under Your Food Budget

1. 5 Tips To Stay Under Your Food Budget I don’t know about you, but when I go to the grocery store, I feel pretty overwhelmed. When you consider just how much action is going on here, it’s easy to see why. So many colors, so many numbers, so many people, so many cash registers BEEPING, it’s enough to send a person running in fright, if they’d never been to the store before! Then to top it off, you have employees constantly asking if you need help finding anything. Well of course I need help! I need help finding the most bang for my buck, while running through an insane marketing obstacle course. 1. Plan! Grocery shopping is truly an art form that takes many attempts to be able to master over and over again. Companies are out to make money, and they will do a great job at it, unless you plan out what you will buy before you go. Once you get to the store, you need to stick to your plan. It’s very tempting to buy things on your list, but did you know that stores are actually designed to make you want to buy more? If you fail to write out a list of items that you need, you are much more likely to fall victim to this design, and walk out with a cart heaping with food that you don’t really need.

2. 2. Heads up When you walk down a grocery aisle, where do your eyes go? If you are like any average human being, you look straight ahead. You know what I would do if I were selling hundreds of products in a very small amount of space? I would place the items that could make me the most money, where people are more likely to look! It’s a very simple concept. If you want the best deals, most of the time you need to work to find them. Look up and look down when you start looking for what you want. The majority of the time, you will find cheaper prices on the bottom and top shelves of aisles. 3. End Caps Especially around the holidays, stores will place pretty decent deals on the ends of their main aisles, out where items are more visible. I realize this runs counter to my previous point, but bear with me. Other items that are placed on end caps are things that they may not be receiving anymore, or are getting replaced by some other item. This requires the store to get rid of the old product, which usually means a good discount for any consumers looking for a good deal. I recently came across a great end cap deal, and picked up 4, 11 ounce bags of cereal for just $1.00. To give you an idea, the average box of cereal is between 10 and 15 ounces. 4. Add It Up

3. I used to have issues with not doing silly things in public, and walking around stores with a calculator was one of them. Nowadays, even if it doesn’t mean it’ll help save me money, I really don’t care too much what people think of me. To this end, I now walk around grocery stores with the calculator on my phone out, ready to add up every item I put in my cart. This is an excellent way to stay under budget. Even if this is the only thing you do, you’ll stay under, if you stick to the rule. If you’re about to go over the amount you have budgeted, then stop buying, it’s as simple as that. If you find you need something, but that it’ll put you over, just make a trade off. There must be something that you don’t “need”. 5. Stick to Sales/Coupons My wife and I have a rule, where we try not to buy anything that is not on sale. If you pay attention, you’ll notice that most things go on sale at one point or another throughout the year, so if you wait to buy something until then, you’ll put a little more back in your pocket. A lot of things go on sale once or twice a month, such as cereal. If you don’t mind being unhealthy, pop always goes on sale at least twice a month. When you combine sales with any coupons that you have, the savings can add up to 50% or more on certain items. This is a tremendous amount of money back into your pocket. Over the last couple years of grocery shopping, I’ve really noticed that sales, and coupons line up very nicely with each other. Take a little time to go through your local flyer, or go to www.coupon.com, install the little application, and clip away. Coupons from this site are usually around a dollar off whatever you are buying. Using these tips has allowed my wife and I to stay at, and usually below $40 bucks each week. That’s a mere $2,000 dollars every year. According to Forbes, I should be spending ​150% more than that, sitting at just over $5,000 for my level of income, if I were in line with the national average. Does this mean we are winning the savings game? What strategies do you use to be below average?