Saving Money on Groceries – the Price Book- Part III

I add items to my price book gradually. Say this week I’m thinking to buy canned pumpkin. Well I don’t buy that often so it may not be in my book. If I don’t need it right away, the next time I’m at a store I’ll just enter the price into my book and pass it up, and check out other stores as I find myself at them. I only enter a new line for an item when there is a new price to beat, but I always want to know where I can get the lowest regular price, too, in case it’s not on sale when I want it. One store might have the lowest everyday price, but another might have the lowest price when it’s in season and on sale. But typically, I’ll only have one or two entries for each item. When a regular price goes up, I erase the old price and correct it.

After I come home from a grocery shopping trip it’s a good time to spend 5 minutes writing down any new items. For some items, like fresh green beans or canned peas or chicken, your grocery tape may not say the price per pound or list the weight at all, so these in particular you want to catch after your shopping trip and before you discard the information on your food package.

I know everyone thinks they know the cheapest place to get your food, but trust me — you don’t! If you keep a price book and go to all the places in your area, you’ll start to see that you can save an awful lot! Like the white flour I used in the example that I usually purchase for $1; the two regular grocery stores in my town will occasionally have sales, usually before the holidays, but the regular price for white flour is about $2.79. That’s a high price to pay for the convenience of one-stop shopping when I can go to the dollar store once a month and get many items more cheaply there. One trip to buy flour and I save $1.79. It probably costs me less than a quarter in gas to drive there.

Using a price book doesn’t mean you have to always buy the cheapest generic item. Buy generic when it doesn’t matter to you so that you can splurge where it does matter and still have a low grocery budget. I know I can get a pound of coffee for under $3, but I really like the $6-10 a pound coffee! I’ll gladly eat generic pasta, tomato paste, beans, tuna fish, peanut butter, etc. to afford my better coffee, but luckily I can do all this, have my coffee, and still purchase all my groceries for about half the national average.

 

Saving Money on Groceries – the Price Book- Part 2

So for example, here are some entries in my price book, each entered under the appropriate page so that I can find it quickly:

lemons F 3/1.00 R
white flour D 5# 1.00 R
laundry detergent D 40 load 2.75 R

So in other words, I purchased 3 lemons at the flea market for a dollar, a 5# bag of white flour at a dollar store, and also at the dollar store a large jug of laundry detergent that will do 40 loads for $2.75. All these items I got at regular price.

So now that I have these entries, if I go to Sparks Supermarket and I see lemons on sale with a huge special sign at 1.99 for 3, I’m not fooled even though they are marketing it as if this “low” price is indeed unusual. I’ve got my handy book to tell me “the price to beat.” But if I go over to Cost-Less and I see they have laundry detergent that will do 40 loads and it’s $2.50, then I will write a new line right under the other laundry line like so:

laundry det D 40 load 2.75 R
laundry det C 40 load 2.50 R

So do I run all over creation to save a quarter? No. But it doesn’t work that way.
First start keeping your book and be sure to check out every store, stand, co-op, etc. within a comfortable drive of your home and on your way to work or any other route you regularly take for other reasons. The plan is, the place that is the best overall for fresh food prices, you will go to every week. The others stores you will rotate and visit one every week. So pretty much you only have to go to two stores a week, but you might be shopping for different items at five stores over the course of the month. Follow?

I prevent confusion when I shop by keeping separate shopping lists for the different stores. When I need to put an item on my shopping list, I look it up in my price book, and then, say it’s lemons, that would go on the flea market shopping list, while the flour and laundry soap would go on the dollar store list. Without much trouble you’ll get the knack of putting staples like flour on the shopping list before you start running low.

 

Saving Money on Groceries – the Price Book- Part 1

The most useful tool I’ve found for reducing my grocery costs is to keep a “price book.” I first heard about the idea from Amy Dacyzn (pronounced “decision”), author of the Tightwad Gazette. She went from rags to riches (she has 6 kids, too!) by being a tightwad. So no, she’s not writing her gazette anymore, she’s probably getting a professional massage or is in the hot tub (I would hope), but the newsletters were compiled and released into three books and you can probably find them at your library. They are also now in one volume called, The Complete Tightwad Gazette.

Anyway, the price book was invaluable, and it is something you make yourself and it’s FREE! I found I only need about 20 pieces of paper in a small notebook. It has to be small because I want it to fit in my purse so that I always have it with me.

You can organize yours any way that makes sense to you, but I wrote at the tops of my pages:

Notes (This is where I write the key to my shorthand abbreviations, how many cups of flour are in a 5 pound bag, etc.)

Beans
Beverages
Dairy
Fruit
Grains
Herbs & Spices
Meat & Fish
Nuts
Oils, Butter, etc.
Vegetables
Misc.
Cleaners (& shampoo, etc.)
Paper and Plastic Products (& foil, tampons, etc)

So to start, set up your book at home and pull out any grocery tapes you have. This will only take you half an hour at most. It will take you a few weeks to get your price book rolling, but then after that it will be a lot less work, and it’s really not a lot of work to begin with.

For each item you typically buy, you want to write in pencil on a horizontal line in your book:

Item / a letter code for the store you buy it at / the weight, amount or volume / price / and then I like to add a one letter code, R for regular price, S for sale price and C for clearance price, and actually it’s also not a bad idea to put the date if you have room on your page.

 

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Anjani Upponi, RD, CDE, of ETMC Diabetes University Discusses enjoying the holiday season while living with diabetes and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Courtesy of etmc.org and http

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Anjani Upponi, RD, CDE, of ETMC Diabetes University Discusses enjoying the holiday season while living with diabetes and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Courtesy of etmc.org and http

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Anjani Upponi, RD, CDE, of ETMC Diabetes University Discusses enjoying the holiday season while living with diabetes and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Courtesy of etmc.org and http

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