There are a number of ways you can save money on your groceries. One the easiest and best is to make a grocery list and stick to it. We look for specials and coupons in our local newspaper, build menus around them and then make a list of the ingredients we will need.
Ignore those impulses
In addition to making grocery shopping simpler, if you have a list and stick to it, you eliminate impulse buying. Most people don’t realize this, but you can actually increase your grocery bill by $5, $10 or even more with impulse purchases. No matter how good that prepared meal or snack crackers might look, if the item is not on your list, don’t buy it.
Use all the coupons you can
Another way to save money on groceries is with coupons. Your local newspaper may have a weekly food section. If so you can bet that it will have coupons. If your newspaper doesn’t have coupons or if you don’t subscribe to a newspaper, you can go online to your favorite stores and find printable coupons. I was on our local supermarket’s website the other day and found that you could choose a special and then just load it into your loyalty card. In other words, with this store you don’t even need to clip coupons any more.
Change your eating habits?
The other way to save money on your groceries is by changing your eating habits. For example, eating tuna fish or salmon patties will save you a lot of money versus T-bone steaks or pork tenderloins. We have salmon patties at least once a week on the average. No, they might not taste as delicious as T-bone steaks but we can have salmon patties for about $8 less than the steaks.
Have you tried ground turkey in place of ground beef? It generally costs at least $1 less than ground beef and can be a lot better for you. We buy a package of ground turkey every week and then use half of it to make spaghetti with meat sauce and the other half for turkey burgers. This means we’ve gotten two meals for less than $4.
Find lower costing substitutes
When you stop to think about, there are lower-cost substitutions for almost everything you buy at your supermarket. As an example of this, store brands always cost less than national brands and the odds are your store has its own brands for probably 70% or 80% of what it sells. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to change from eating T-bones to tuna fish or pork cutlets to salmon patties, and to buy store brands instead of nationally advertised brands. But between you two, you should be able to easily save $20-$30 a week on your groceries.