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.
