Saturday morning is the time my wife and I usually grocery shop together. By then she has clipped all of the coupons, we have discussed the list of things we think we need and how much we want to spend. She has also run a report from www.thegrocerygame.com, which is a nice list of deals that includes in-store specials, manufacturers coupons, and other seemingly secret non-advertised specials.
Watching our diets closely these days for weight loss and health, we buy no snack items, pop, deserts and little manufactured foods like frozen pizza bites. We buy a lot of fresh fruits, vegetables, and try to buy organic when it is available at a low-cost. Therefore, we might not save as much as others, but we do pretty good.
We start out shopping at Aldi’s for certain items that know we could not have gotten at a lower cost anywhere else, but are of good quality, and spent about $16. Aldi’s and other stores like that have very low-cost items, mostly all non national named brand.
The second trip was to Meijer ( upper Mid-western chain). We spent $82.74, and we saved $38.46. This represents $3 in online store promotions (you have to sign up for this), $20.66 in non-coupon savings, $14.80 in coupon savings. We would have spent $121.20 had we not planned together, and used coupons and these other tactics. My wife is a little embarrassed that we didn’t save more, because she has been doing The Grocery Game and couponing for about 5 years, and our savings is usually greater. But using this example as an average, because sometime we do better and worse, $38.46 in savings represents $1,999.92 savings per year.
Is couponing worth it? That is two grand towards your choice: vacation, car repairs, debt reduction, increase in contribution to retirement or college education plan.
I will review The Grocery Game and other things mentioned here in future articles but I want to mention one deals. We both take our lunches, however we dislike nitrates that are in most lunch meats. I went to an organic food store the other day, and their organic and nitrate free lunch meats were about $13 per pound. I try to stay away from nitrates because I have read that they trigger my migraine headaches, but we can’t afford $13 per pound or $1.23 per ounce. I was surprised to see something for the first time, Hormel lunch meet without preservatives. It was on sale for $2.63 per 8 ounce package , and if we bought two we got a loaf of Brownberry bread for free. The cost per ounce is 33 cents, not organic but no preservatives and a great deal.
3 thoughts on “$2k in Grocery Savings”
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Sounds a lot like us. Don’t beat yourself up about not saving more. We all have trips like that now and then. I recently saw the price for organic lunchmeat too and thought it was ridiculous. Seeing that inspired my most recent post. I think couponing is worth it. I average about 50% savings with coupon use. I think it’s fabulous that you’re involved with the process and care about the hard work your wife puts in to get you great savings at the grocery store!
Costco now sells a lot of organic stuff including lunch meats. Are you finding it harder these days to save as much with coupons as you once did a few years ago, do you have any new tips?
I’m not near a Costco, unfortunately. I still use coupons a great deal. I find the best ones online and am more selective about the ones I clip. Coupon policies seem to be more strict in my neck of the woods too. I’d say I use them as often and probably save just as much because I have more ways to find them than just relying on the newspaper as I used to do. A tip would be to find a blogger who happens to have a coupon database so that you can search for exactly what you are looking for. It saves me time, paper and ink. I’m thinking about doing this on my blog but haven’t yet because of the technical aspect of it. I guess I should just ask someone how to go about it. 🙂