Groceries Part 2: the new way

Although the old way of doing the groceries had worked for us for a few years, we both came to the conclusion that we could go about it smarter. Believe it or not, we were spending $400 every month on groceries- for just 2 people! I know prices are a little more expensive in D.C. but $400/month was still over the top.

I'm not sure where I got new ideas for how to do the groceries, whether it was from a blog, a podcast, or a book, but they have worked wonders. I've been doing a few new things.

1) I started a price book. I know I got this tip from a book I read called "Your Money or Your Life". The purpose of a price book is to get an idea of how much things are and how to spot a good price. So you take a notebook and divide it up by each letter in the alphabet. On each page you will create columns for the name of the grocery store, the date, the item, the size and brand of the item, the price, and the unit price (you can find templates online to print out). You then write this information down in the notebook while you're in the grocery store, or you can do it when you get home by looking at the receipt and the groceries you bought. This takes a little bit of time, but after a while you will get an idea of how much things are. Remember in Part 1, we used to do groceries without really looking at prices, not anymore. After a while (a couple months) you will start to notice patterns in the price of an item at a particular store. So pasta may go for $0.69 at Safeway every six weeks.

2) I look at the weekly circulars for the grocery stores in my area. I don't actually have a grocery store near me (the joys of living in a city), but I do have metro access to several different chain grocery stores. It's actually worked to our benefit to not have one store that we shop at because it leaves us open to go to the store that's having the best sales that week. So what I usually do is go online and go to the store's website and pull their weekly circular and I'll take a giant legal-sized pad and a pen and I'll write down the name of the store and list each item that I want to buy and the price. With my price book, I can tell if an item that's advertised as being on sale, is truly on sale.

3) I develop a meal plan. I LOVE to plan things so making a plan for what we'll be eating the next week or two is actually fun for me. First, I go shopping in my kitchen. I walk a few feet into my kitchen, look in the refrigerator, in the cabinets, in the freezer and I take note of what I already have. Then I look at the sales I've written down from the circulars and I begin to write down dinners I can make with what I already have and what's for sale. I try to write 2 weeks worth of dinners on the same piece of paper that I wrote the sales on. Then I write down my grocery list (on the same piece of paper). I use my meal plan to decide how many of a certain item I will need. So if I'm going to be making tacos and pasta with a side salad in a week, I know I'm going to need 1 onion and maybe 3 tomatoes. This way I'm not just guessing how much produce I will need and risking it going bad.

So you can see we've pretty much done away with the running grocery list. Following these methods have definitely helped us not only save money, but save time. I have an entire 2 weeks worth of dinners to pick from every night. I know I have all of the ingredients so I'm not metro-ing to the grocery store and we're not getting take-out because we don't know what to make for dinner. I've been doing the groceries this way for about 3 months and we are now spending around $200 every month! As I keep learning about how to save money on groceries I'm improving my strategy. Next time I'll talk about the direction I'm trying to go in with buying groceries because I think it will help us save even more.