Want to Save on Grocery Expenses?

In my family, what works best is when my husband does the shopping! He really sticks to what’s in his list. He’s very good at that, and for that, i’m very much grateful.

I came up with some pointers that are working in my family:

• We list down the items that we need to buy, and we really bring it to the grocery store. Armed with the list, we then try to avoid buying anything that’s not on our list.
• We also patronize store brand items. This is where we save the most, because a quarter of the price of the branded items are slashed if we buy store brand items.
• We rarely bring our kids to the grocery store, because more often than not, there would be an additional item like candies or biscuit that aren’t in our list. Sometimes, my youngest daughter would request to have a toy, although it’s a cheap one, i still find it a waste of money especially if after a day or two i just find it lying around the house, completely forgotten.
• I bring a calculator to the store and add-up the items to make sure that i’m within the budget.
• I carefully check the labels of the products and compare costs per ounce, because items which are individually wrapped almost always cost more per ounce. Although an exception to this is for those perishable items which I normally buy in smaller quantities.
• I also take advantage of bundled items in my favorite grocery store. With these bundled items comes a free item, like, soy sauce, sugar, iodized salt — all store-brand. This also saves me a lot of money because the budget that i allocate for these items which i get for free, can now be used for the other items in my list.