However, things aren’t quite that simple – you can’t just trust the store flyer.

Over the last several months, I’ve been keeping track of prices on several key items that we buy all the time. Garbage bags, fresh spinach, toilet paper, grapes, Pepperidge Farm goldfish crackers, and so on.

I know what the typical price is on these items – I even have a small price list that has the usual prices for them.

So, a few weeks ago, when I took a long look at the flyers from my grocery stores of choice, I happened to notice that some of the “big sales” listed in the flyer weren’t on sale at all. The price was exactly the same as what I usually paid.

What gives? I did some research – calling and emailing a few people I know in the grocery business – and I came up with a few interesting facts about grocery store flyers.

For starters, a large portion of the spots in a grocery store ad are actually paid placements by the product manufacturers. That “sale” on Coca-Cola? It’s likely that Coca-Cola – or a local distributor – paid your grocery store to have their product inserted into the ad. The price of that “sale” item is often unchanged from the normal price – the only reason it’s in the flyer is to put a few more bucks in the pocket of the grocery store itself.

Why would a company pay for such placements? According to Tod Marks of Consumers Union, a mere mention of a product in a grocery store flyer can send sales of that product up as much as 500%. Thus, in many cases, the small cost of the product mention in the flyer can easily be recouped by a big bump in sales.

Another technique often used in flyers is quantity-based tricks. Let’s say, for example, that you typically buy a quart of cottage cheese for $1.49. In the flyer, you might notice that cottage cheese is on “sale” for $0.99 – but it turns out that this is the pint container, not the quart. Without careful reading, one might head out to the grocery store and grab that $0.99 “bargain” without thinking about it, actually paying more per pint of cottage cheese.

These two factors lead to the real question: how can you trust grocery store flyers at all? Here are some tactics I’ve found that work well for finding the real deals in the flyers.

First, ignore “brand name” products. Quite often, these are placed by the large food companies and don’t actually reflect much of a bargain at all. Just skip right past them. Occasionally, one of these might be a “loss leader,” but you can usually only find them if you’re really good at filtering out all of the noise.

Second, focus on the fresh items. The items that are fresh – fresh produce and fresh meats – are rarely branded at all. These items tend to be the real sales in the flyer (but not always – you should always have a good grasp on what the real prices are).

Third, “quantity” sales are often tricky. Let’s say you see some particular item on sale – 2/$5. That could mean a lot of things – it might mean that the items are actually $2.50 each and you don’t actually need to buy two items to get the discount, or it might mean that just buying one item will cost you $3.29 or so – which isn’t really a deal at all. Read the fine print and don’t just immediately buy more than you need or assume it’s a great deal.

Finally, know your quantities. Sometimes, “sales” loudly proclaimed in a flyer are for very small sizes. Once you’re actually in the store, however, you’ll find that the the larger size is actually the better deal, even though it’s not on “sale.” Sales on small quantity items almost always indicate something that’s not really a bargain (unless you can couple a coupon with it and get it for free).

Flyers have a lot of good deals, but there’s a lot of noise as well. Figure out how to filter through the noise and you’ll save yourself a lot of money on groceries.

As we shop, we make tons and tons of little decisions along the way. Those decisions, on their own, seem inconsequential.

Should we buy the bulk can of diced tomatoes or the smaller can?
These tortillas feel softer, but they’re way more expensive – is it worth it?
The free range whole chickens are on sale! Should we stock up?

A choice one way or another here might save us a dollar or cause us to spend a dollar more. In the eyes of many people, it’s an inconsequential decision – just make it and keep going. One dollar doesn’t make a huge difference, right?

The problem is that each little buying decision you make is deeply tied to other buying decisions, whether consciously or not.

How so, you might ask?

All of our buying decisions are based on a set of principles in our head, ones that are often so well-grounded that they don’t even pop up in conscious thought.

Here’s a thought experiment to help you see what I mean. Imagine a product you would never buy in a grocery store – pork rinds, maybe, or perhaps insanely potent hot sauce. Now, what about that product would cause you to not buy it? You’re likely to pop up an immediate simple answer – I don’t like the taste or it’s unhealthy – but on other purchases, you’re quite willing to overlook that principle for other reasons.

In truth, when we make a decision to buy in the grocery store, we’re trying to reduce a big set of principles and inputs down to one split-second decision. And often we feel we’re completely justified in that decision – and we move on with life.

It is very easy to tease apart each little buying decision, tell yourself that it doesn’t really matter that much and that it’s okay to splurge, and then essentially ignore your final tally when you get to the checkout because each decision was justified in your mind. Doing that, though, is a game that will, time and time again, put your wallet in the hurt locker.

So, what can you do to overcome this problem?

The easy methods are the shopping list and the meal plan. Making a shopping list in advance of your visit to the grocery store simply serves to reduce the number of decisions you have to make. This, of course, leads you to making fewer bad decisions.

But that’s just the start. Once you’re in the store with your shopping list in hand, commit to three more things.

First, simply do not put anything in your cart that’s not on your list. Your list, if it’s thought out at all, should have everything you need for your meals for the next week. If you see something you feel like you need or deserve, jot it on the back of the list for next time.

Second, mark any items that you’re not simply searching for the cheapest version of. On our list, I like to put a little X by any item that I don’t intend to just buy the cheapest version of. For example, with diced tomatoes, the various brands and cans are identical in terms of ingredients, so we usually just get the cheapest version. This, again, reduces the number of opportunities for poor impulse decisions in the store.

Third, if you have specific brands in mind (because of coupons or because of previous buying experiences), put those on your list, too, along with the size. For example, we usually have a big stack of coupons for V8 Fusion (100% juice, half fruit and half vegetable). So, instead of just writing “fruit juice x 3,” I’ll write “46 oz. V8 Fusion x 3″ on the list. In other words, if you make the list more specific, you further reduce the number of potential impulse decisions in the store.

Using all of these techniques, you’ll end up making just a handful of in-the-moment choices in the grocery store – and with fewer potential decisions, you have fewer chances to make poor ones. The end result? A cart full of items that you actually want and a much smaller grocery bill.

I like reading all of your suggestions about making a grocery list and searching for bargains. My technique is actually pretty simple. I trust Consumer Reports completely – they’ve never led me wrong. So each month when I get an issue, I write down their “best buys” in each product category. That’s what I buy – I just look for the best deal among these. I often use coupons for things on that list, too.

I actually really like this idea – it provides a wonderful balance of getting quality items for a good price. In fact, I decided to give it a try myself with a few product categories just to see the results with my own eyes, so I pulled out the May 2009 issue of Consumer Reports and went shopping with five product categories in mind.

Kids’ Breakfast Cereal
Consumer Reports identified four best buys for cereals for children, balancing health, tastiness, and price: Cheerios, Life, Kix, and Honey Nut Cheerios.

I pulled out the grocery flyers this past weekend and found a sale at Target on the General Mills cereals (Cheerios and Life). I then flipped through the coupons and quickly found a coupon for those cereals.

End result: the price for a “double box” of Cheerios or of Life, after the coupon, was cheaper than almost any other cereal in the aisle, with only some generics beating them. After doing an ingredient and Nutrition Facts comparison, Life was our product of choice. The kids utterly love it and it’s pretty good for them, too.

Glass Cleaners
Consumer Reports identified five best buys for window cleaners: Windex No Drip Foaming Action, Sprayway Ammonia Free, Windex Crystal Rain Ammonia Free, Glass Plus, and Streak Free with Ammonia (the Wal-Mart store brand).

The solution here is a simple one: shop at Wal-Mart and get the store brand at roughly a third of the price of the other brands.

Coffee
I’m far from an expert on this category (as I don’t make coffee at home – keeping it as an out-of-home treat keeps me from getting addicted to the morning joe), but Consumer Reports identified Eight O’Clock 100% Colombian, Caribou Coffee Colombia Timana, and Kickapoo Coffee Organic Colombia as the three best choices.

In the stores I visited, Eight O’Clock 100% Colombian was the cheapest of the three by far, usually costing less than $5 for a 12 ounce bag of whole bean coffee. Here’s the trick, though – there were many coffees that were less expensive.

Since I’m not familiar with this area, I asked my wife for some input and she said that unquestionably, the price premium of the Eight O’Clock coffee over Folgers is worth it. She claims the volume difference in the containers is deceiving, since it takes substantially more Folgers to make good coffee than whole bean Eight O’Clock. So, three votes for the Consumer Reports model.

Tub & Tile Cleaners
Consumer Reports says Comet Scratch Free Disinfectant with Bleach, Ajax with Bleach Scratch Free, Kaboom Shower Tub & Tile, and Green Works Natural Bathroom Cleaner are the best choices, with Green Works being not quite up to the standards of the other but the best of the “natural” cleaners.

Coupons for Comet are extremely easy to come by and they reduce the cost of Comet below the store generic brand for that item. It works well for cleaning our tubs.

Creamy Peanut Butter
This was the one area where there was some debate. Consumer Reports identifies Smucker’s Natural and Smucker’s Organic as the two best buys for peanut butter.

Smucker’s Natural is substantially cheaper than Smucker’s Organic, ringing in at $2.49 for a 12 ounce jar at my store of choice. However, there were several peanut butters available for substantially less on the shelves. Having tasted Smucker’s Natural, I can say that it is quite noticeably tastier (much stronger peanut flavor) than many of the lower-end brands, and the texture is better, too. An ingredient comparison shows that it’s healthier as well.

For me, Smucker’s Natural would be the purchase if I had a coupon for it. Otherwise, I’d put off buying the peanut butter.

My Conclusion
From my experience, Bob’s strategy simply works if you’re trying to get the maximum value for your dollar (and not just seek the bottom dollar). This strategy pairs up well with looking at coupons and flyers, reducing the price benefit that the store brand has over the “best buy.”

Will I switch to this strategy? Perhaps not completely, but I am starting a list of the Consumer Reports best buys. It works surprisingly well.

Is it worth it for you? I can’t answer that question – it’s clearly worth it for us, as we save literally hundreds a year shopping at Sam’s Club versus shopping at other grocery stores and department chains.

However, I can suggest a pretty easy way for you to figure out for yourself if you would save money at a warehouse store.

Make a “Bulk Buying” List
Your first step is to make a big list of all of the things you might be willing to buy in bulk for your home. The items to really focus on are nonperishable items that you use consistently and perishables that you use only on a very consistent basis. Some of these might include dishwashing detergent, laundry detergent, laundry softener, garbage bags, flour, rice, bread, milk, eggs, fruit juice, cleaning supplies, water filters, breakfast cereal, oatmeal, and so on.

One great way to do this is to save grocery and department store receipts for a few weeks (or a few months) and use those as a starting point. Go through those receipts, pick out the items that are regularly repeated (or are nonperishable and you have room to store), and make a new list of just those items.

On that same list, write down the prices and the units. So, for example, if you buy a bundle of 36 rolls of toilet paper, write down the number of rolls and the price of the package. Number of rolls, number of bags, number of packets, number of servings, and so on are all key numbers to write down here.

After that, you’ll want to calculate the price per unit of each of these items. It’s easy – just divide the price of the package by the number of units. If you bought a 36 pack of toilet paper for $7.99, you’d just divide $7.99 by 36 to get $0.22 per roll. This is an important number to have when you’re evaluating bulk prices.

Get a Day Pass
Once you have your list of things you’d regularly buy in bulk, get a day pass to your local warehouse store. Call the local branches and ask whether or not you can get a day pass at the front desk. Most such stores will offer one once – often, any purchases you make with that pass would cost you 10% extra (but don’t worry about that).

Go to the store, pick up your pass, and go around the store with your list and your calculator. Ideally, you’ll want to find as many of the items as you can – and you’ll put only the ones that are actually a bargain into your cart.

Know How to Calculate Per-Unit Prices
Figuring out which ones are a bargain is pretty easy. Just find the item you’re looking for, find the price and the number of items in the package, then use your calculator to divide the price by the number of items to get the price per item. If it’s better than the one on your list, add the item to your cart and jot down the better price per item on your list, along with the number of units. Don’t worry about the 10% difference on your one day pass at all yet.

Easy enough – most of you probably yawned your way through that tip. But here’s the kicker. At the end of the trip, you’re going to need to decide if the full membership is worth your money. Here’s how you do that.

Figure Up Your Total Deal
Go through your list and figure out the difference between the two prices per unit. For example, if you’ve got $0.16 per roll toilet paper in your cart and your previous best deal was $0.22, the difference is $0.06. Multiply that difference by the size of the package in the cart. So, if you’ve got a 36-pack of toilet paper rolls, multiply the $0.06 savings by 36 rolls, giving you $2.16.

Do this for every item in your cart, then add up the results. This total should be significant enough that it’s very clear you’ll save money over the course of a year. You might find that the stuff in your cart pays for the membership right now, or that it’s close. If that’s the case, go straight to the customer service desk, sign up for an annual membership, and check out. If that’s not the case, pull out any items that are cheaper at your other shopping locations and check out whatever is left in your cart (since, even with the 10% charge, they should be cheaper than you’d pay elsewhere).

On our staples – dishwashing detergent, water filters, bread, wine (Sam’s actually has a very good wine selection), olive oil, and so on – we regularly save enough to pay for the annual membership in a single trip.

The Real Trick
The real trick with warehouse clubs is to know how to focus on the stuff you’ll actually use in good time and avoid the stuff you don’t actually use in large quantity. When we shop there, we basically only buy things we know we will consume in their entirety in the near future (i.e., a bottle of wine) or we use so consistently that we’ll get through it pretty quickly (i.e., dishwashing detergent).

If you don’t stick to a similar policy, you’ll end up with a cupboard full of unusable stuff – and that’s a huge waste of money. Focus on the staples, though, and warehouse clubs can likely save you quite a few dollars.

Good luck!

When I tell this to people, they usually sigh and say, “Doesn’t all that planning take a lot of time?” Frankly, it doesn’t take that much time at all, and since it saves us from making multiple grocery store visits in a week, it might actually save time in the long run in addition to the money saved.

Here’s exactly how we do it.

Step 1: Get a Flyer
The most important step is to get a flyer from your grocery store – or perhaps flyers from two or three local grocery stores. There are a lot of ways to get these – in a local newspaper, in the mail, or online, for starters. I usually download the flyer from the website of the grocery stores we visit – Hy-Vee and Fareway.

Step 2: Find Sales on Fresh Ingredients
Once I have the flyers, I go through them and mark any sales on fresh ingredients that they have. For example, as I write this, I’m reviewing Hy-Vee’s ad for October 14 through October 20, and I’m noticing several things on sale: fresh zucchini for $0.89 a pound, fresh yellow squash for $0.89 a pound, sweet yellow onions for $0.99 a pound, yellow bell peppers for $0.99 a pound, tons of apple sales, ground turkey for $2.18 a pound, hormone- and antibiotic-free cageless chicken for $1.99 a pound, and so on.

I ignore the sales on most prepackaged items. We focus on buying fresh foods and staples like flour for our meals. Over the long haul, the fresh items are cheaper and healthier.

Step 3: Do Some Recipe Research
This week, I know I’ll be working with ground turkey, whole chicken, zucchini and squash, yellow bell peppers, sweet yellow onions, apples, and the other meat we have in our freezer from bulk purchases. What recipes can I find that utilize these ingredients?

I go to a recipe search engine like FoodieView and just enter combinations of the on-sale fresh ingredients that sound interesting. My first attempt was searching for “turkey, zucchini, onion” and I immediately found a turkey and zucchini meat loaf recipe from Epicurious. Searching for “yellow bell, chicken” gets me an interesting chicken bell pepper recipe (which I’ll use, but modify a bit). Chicken-apple-bacon burgers? Yum. Plus, you can easily grill sliced squash (dipped in olive oil and ground pepper) for a wonderful vegetable side dish.

These ideas provide the backbone for several meals throughout the week, so I start planning ahead.

Step 4: Create a Week-Long Meal Plan
I usually start off with my blank meal-planning worksheet and fill in the dinners first based on the above recipes. For us, breakfasts are usually quite simple and lunches usually consist of leftovers, so those columns are quite easy as well.

I usually try to make most weeknight meals pretty easy. I usually attempt one difficult recipe during the week and one on a weekend, with the others being simple. Whole chicken roasting? That’s a difficult one. Chicken-apple burgers? Easy.

We usually have homemade pizza one night a week, often Fridays. We also often have pasta one night a week, often Tuesdays (for some reason). So I’ll pencil those things in, too. We have plenty of ingredients on hand for both, so I don’t really need to shop for them – buying flour in bulk makes crust easy, and we keep tons of tomato sauce and ground beef on hand at all times.

Given all that, it’s pretty easy to fill in the rest of the squares on that meal plan. I usually only need to come up with five suppers per week and two to three lunches per week (for meals where leftovers from the night before don’t carry over). Often, these are just simple sandwiches.

Step 5: Make a Shopping List from the Meal Plan
Once the meal plan is in place, I go through and list all of the ingredients for all of the recipes I’ll make and then cross off the things we have as I find them in the cupboards or refrigerator. Most of this is very easy, but it saves us money – we don’t accidentally buy things we already have on hand.

I also check the staples – flour, milk, yeast, juice boxes, and so on – and add replenishments to the list.

Step 6: Go Grocery Shopping – And Stick to Your List
Once you have the list in place, it’s simple. Take it to the grocery store and stick to it. Don’t toss stuff that’s not on your list into the cart. Since you’ve already planned your meals, you know that you don’t need it.

Using this path will also make grocery shopping itself substantially quicker. Most of your purchases will be around the edges of the store, in the produce and meat sections. You won’t have to go up and down every aisle to find the items you need. This will shave significant time off of your shopping trip.

In the end, though, when you go home, unpack your groceries, and put that meal plan up on the fridge, you’ll find that overall it hasn’t taken you any more time than a grocery trip without planning would have taken, plus you now have a clear plan for meals for the week and you’ve saved significant money at the grocery store.

Good luck!

But there’s a problem with that philosophy, one that’s explained very well by Allie, who recently emailed me on this topic:

The reason I don’t buy generics is because I’ve usually already found a brand I like, so why should I risk buying something I don’t like?

It’s a good argument, so let’s walk through the logic a bit and see where it leads us.

The Generic Argument
Let’s say you’re in a grocery store and you’re looking at your various options for tomato sauce. You can either buy a name brand you’re familiar with – like Hunt’s – or you can buy the store’s generic brand. Which do you choose?

If you flip the cans over and compare the ingredients, you’ll usually find that they’re identical. The contents of the can you’re buying are the one and the same for many items.

The only significant differences, in many cases, are the labeling and the price. The name brand usually has a prettier label from a brand you recognize, but the other one is usually substantially cheaper.

If the item inside the package is the same, take the cheaper one. Is it really a value to spend extra for that nice label and that name that you may have heard of before? Likely, it’s not.

But Not All Items Are The Same
Obviously, though, there are differences in quality between brands with many items. You might not be able to distinguish between tomato sauces, for example, but you certainly can distinguish between brands of toilet paper.

Because of this varying quality, most people tend to find a brand that they know they like and stick with it (lo and behold, the status quo bias strikes again!). It actually makes sense – it makes shopping easier and you know you’ll wind up with a product that works for you.

This is the thought process that leads people to fill up their cart with name brand items. They are familiar with those items and know that they meet their basic needs, and because this is the “norm,” they fill up their cart with those items, quietly paying the premium cost for a perceived insurance of basic quality.

The “Generic” Experiment
Instead of following that route, try this one on for size. The next time you go to the grocery store, actively replace all of your regular purchases with the low-end generics. Buy the cheap dish soap, the cheap deodorant, and the cheap wheat bread. Then just use them like normal and see if you actually notice any difference.

Likely, you will notice that some items are lower in quality. Some might even find that some aren’t acceptable for your use. However, many of the items will just automatically replace the more expensive versions without you even noticing.

Keep track of the ones that work for you and the ones that don’t. You may find that generic spaghetti is a good buy for your family, but your family hates the generic toilet paper. Lesson learned – go back to the name brand toilet paper, but stick with the generic spaghetti.

Make Up For The Losses
All of this sounds great in theory, but it doesn’t really help if you’re standing in your kitchen one night holding a jar of really foul generic peanut butter that you don’t want to consume. If you’re just throwing that jar of peanut butter away, isn’t that a waste of money?

Of course it’s a waste of money, but if you discover a handful of generic items that work for you and your family, it more than balances out over the long haul. Let’s say you try twenty five generic items on your next shopping trip and, on average, they cost $2 and save you $0.50 off the name brand. At the end of that week, you find that ten of the generics are up to snuff and become regular parts of your grocery list, while ten more aren’t up to snuff and five more were bad enough that you had to chuck them.

On that first grocery bill, you saved $12.50 overall. At home, though, you had to chuck five items, which at $2 each ate up $10 of that savings, leaving you only $2.50 ahead and with ten generics you really don’t like. Not the best deal, right?

But look at the long haul. If you buy the ten generics you do like twice a month, your newfound use of generics saves you $10 a month in perpetuity. Every month, you’re spending $10 less than you would have spent and your family is just as happy as they were before.

Give “The Generic Experiment” a Try!
This week, buy generic versions of everything on your shopping list. Keep a list of all of the generics you bought and put it on the fridge. If you discover one of the generic items isn’t up to snuff, just cross it off that list on the fridge.

The items that remain on that list are the “safe generics” – ones that are okay for you to buy. If you find yourself with even a few items on your “safe generic” list, this experiment will pay for itself and far more over the long haul. Likely, you’ll be surprised how many of the generics are as good as the name brands for your own use, and that fact will save you a lot of money on your food and household expenses.

What’s Amazon Grocery?
For those unaware, Amazon Grocery is a section of Amazon.com where one can buy most dry grocery goods and have them shipped directly to your home. This ranges from things like baking mixes to things like diapers and baby formula. Rather than transporting them yourself, Amazon ships the items right to your front door.

As a rule of thumb, the prices at Amazon Grocery are usually a bit higher than the prices in the grocery store, but using it effectively offers several advantages that cause it to be much cheaper for us on many items.

First Thing: Know the Prices
Before you even consider shopping at Amazon Grocery, know how much you’re spending on items at the grocery store. Take out your last few grocery receipts – including both food items and household stuff like laundry detergent, dishwashing detergent, etc. – and go through and mark everything that’s dry on that list. This gives you a baseline: you know exactly how much you’re paying for the item at your local store.

Once you have that in hand, fire up Amazon Grocery and start comparing prices. Almost always, the Amazon price will be somewhat higher than the price on your receipt – don’t sweat it quite yet.

How I Save Money Using Amazon Grocery
Of course, that baseline price for those items is just a starting point. Amazon offers a ton of ways for me to trim down that price and often get it to a level that’s lower than what the grocery store is offering. Here are the tactics I use.

First, I signed up for an Amazon.com Visa for my purchases there. You already need a credit card for your purchases there anyway and the bonus program is stellar if you use it exclusively for Amazon purchases (I use a Citi Driver’s Edge card for most of my purchases). When you sign up for that card when you’re processing an order there, you immediately get $30 off of your order. So, even on a one-time use situation, you can get $30 worth of free groceries shipped to your house.

Second, I use that card for all purchases from Amazon. The card gives you 3% back in Amazon credit for all purchases done with the card on Amazon.com. In other words, when you rack up $833 in purchases on the card, you’ll get a certificate in the mail with a $25 off coupon code on it.

Third, I take advantage of “Subscribe and Save”. Let’s say you run through dishwashing detergent and laundry soap and diapers like clockwork. I know we do – I can practically set the clock by how often we need to refill stuff. If you sign up at Amazon for their “subscribe and save” program on these products, they let you schedule automatic purchases and shipments of these items to your home – and shave another 15%-20% off of the purchase price.

Fourth, I keep an eye out for Amazon Grocery coupons. Once every few months or so, they’ll offer a coupon giving $10 off any Amazon Grocery purchase of $49 or more, which when compounded with the other stuff can really trim your costs.

An Example
Let’s say, hypothetically, that I only wanted to use Amazon Grocery to buy diapers. I log into Amazon and set up a plan to ship me a box of 126 Stage 4 Huggies every month for a year. The default price is high for that box ($34.99 for a box of 126), but not outrageous.

First, I sign up for the “subscribe and save” option. That takes the price down from $34.99 for the box to $27.99 a box. Then, when I check out, I sign up for that Amazon card – giving me the first box for free and $2.01 off the second box. This means that my cost for a year’s worth of these diapers shipped to my door is now $305.88 – a cost of $25.49 on average for each box, which is at or below what you’d pay at the store for the same box. Furthermore, I use the Amazon card for all of the purchases, getting myself about 40% of the way to a $25 gift certificate there. Even better, these diapers just magically arrive on my doorstep without having to worry about it.

Amazon Grocery Doesn’t Always Work, Though
There are a lot of items where “subscribe and save” isn’t available or doesn’t make sense for you, and there are some items where the local store simply offers significantly better prices. It really pays to do the footwork and look beyond the initial price that you see – look at all of the savings available to you and see what is really your best deal.

I don’t use Amazon Grocery for all of the stuff that I could potentially get, but I do use it quite often – and if the price on Amazon ends up being virtually the same as the store cost, I use Amazon because it’s more cost-effective for me to have an item delivered to my front stoop than to grab it at the store, put it in the car, haul it home, and bring it inside. The scheduling is particularly convenient, too, if you can get the price point to the right level – the convenience of just having dishwashing detergent or laundry soap delivered to your door right on time, like clockwork, is quite helpful.

Just a week ago, I touted the benefits of investing in yourself via exercise, and it met with a lot of interesting discussion, including the astute point that exercise and diet are two halves of the same coin when it comes to managing your short-term and long-term health.

It’s true: the food you eat every day has a profound effect on your long term health. High-calorie and high-fat foods might be convenient now, but that time you save right now is taken away from you at the end of your life as a result of unhealthy eating. Even more so, bad eating reduces the quality of your daily life even now in your healthy years. It’s easy to witness this effect – try eating very healthy for a few days and you’ll notice a significant change in how you feel. I often notice it after just one meal – a very healthy breakfast (oatmeal and/or fresh fruits) makes a huge difference for me.

I’m not talking about dieting for weight loss here – I’m talking about eating well for a lifetime of good health. Such eating usually results in weight loss, especially as you transition to it from less healthy eating, but the best way to invest in yourself with your diet is to eat naturally nutritious foods in a balanced fashion.

But what is a nutritious diet? This concept has been heavily marketed over the last decade or so, often to the point that it’s hard for the average consumer to separate fact from perception. I’ve read a lot of books related to food over the last several years (and I’ve discussed a few on here, including In Defense of Food and Volumetrics) and I’ve found that time and time again, a few basic principles are all you really need to cover your bases for a healthy diet.

Prepare more food at home.
At a restaurant of any kind, you’re relying on the food preparers to make selections for you and their primary interest is providing a tasty meal at a fair cost (with different levels of taste and cost depending on the establishment). Most restaurants aren’t really concerned in the least about the long-term health implications of the food you eat – they’re mostly just concerned that it’s tasty and that it pleases you in the short term.

When you prepare food at home, you have more control over the stuff you put into your body. You can make choices that lead towards a healthier lifestyle. When you make pasta, you can substitute in whole wheat – or even make some of your own. You can choose from a wide variety of spaghetti sauces, or else boil up some tomatoes yourself. You can buy a cheap loaf of bread, an artisan loaf, or make one yourself from just a handful of ingredients (flour, sugar, salt, and yeast).

Here are some tips if you’re afraid to make that leap.

Get a cookbook that focuses on teaching technique with a gentle hand. My favorite cookbook along these lines is Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. If there’s something basic that I’m unfamiliar with, this is the book I turn to for tips on getting started. Better yet, Bittman’s recipes tend to lean toward the healthy side (for the most part) and are quite simple to follow.

At first, focus on simple stuff that you’ll find tasty. Don’t try to make something intriguing but nearly impossible right off the bat. Also, don’t decide that the day you’re going to start cooking at home is the day you’re going vegan. Start off making comfort foods, even if they’re not the most healthy dishes you can make, and choose ones that aren’t overly complex. For me, spaghetti with a tomato sauce is the perfect meal for people just starting to cook at home – it’s very simple to prepare in its basic form, most of the stuff you’ll need is easy to acquire, and when you want to start kicking it up in complexity and healthiness (making sauce or pasta or breadsticks from scratch), the basic form is very adaptable.

Eat more vegetables, especially leafy ones.
Our bodies are designed to eat more fruits and vegetables than meat. This harkens back to our hunter-gatherer days, where our diets would consist of mostly gathered fruits, nuts, and vegetables and an occasional large helping of meat when a hunt would be successful. Millions of years of adaptation attuned our biochemistry to this – only in the last few hundred years has our diet changed significantly from that basic structure.

Eat a wide variety of vegetables and fruits, especially fresh ones. Try everything. You’ll find some you like and some you don’t – that’s okay. Just make sure you’re not eating the same vegetable over and over or it will get boring (and it’s not particularly the most healthy choice, either). You’ll also find some stuff that surprises you – my parents both hated okra and so I never tried it until I was in my mid-twenties, when I discovered that I quite liked it.

Eat at least one salad a day. I really, really enjoy a basic salad (lettuce, spinach, radishes, carrots, etc.) with a bit of ranch or blue cheese dressing on it. It’s a very healthy thing to eat, very easy to prepare, and not very expensive, either. We eat one as part of our evening meal almost every night and I occasionally eat one as my lunch, too.

Eat a larger portion of vegetables than meat at any given meal. It’s not very fair to give an exact amount for each one because there are so many variables, but you can rarely go wrong with simply making sure there are more vegetables on your plate than there is meat. Keep that as a constant rule of thumb and you’ll be doing fine.

Avoid heavily processed foods.
Again, the logic for this harkens back to the foods that our bodies are biochemically adapted to eat. We’re made to eat the nutrients found in fresh foods, not the ones found in heavily processed foods. Here are a few things to keep your eye out for.

High-fructose corn syrup appears in a lot of foods. It’s a sugar substitute in many industrial foods because it’s cheaper, easy to blend, and leads to a long shelf life. Because of these properties, HFCS appears in abundance in expected foods and even pops up in significant quantities in food you wouldn’t expect. The consequence of this is that it raises your sweetener intake significantly – and increased sugar intake is not a good thing. You’re far better off just sticking with naturally-occurring sugars – if you need a sugar fix, eat an orange or a banana and avoid foods with HFCS.

Startling health claims are usually a sure sign that a food has been significantly altered in an industrial process, quite often with additives of some sort that are very hard to figure out from the label. Don’t buy a processed food because it has plant sterols added to it – just go eat a vegetable instead.

A large number of ingredients that you can’t easily identify is another sign of serious processing. Again, staple foods have all of the nutritional value that a person needs, so why would you consume this stuff, especially if you don’t know what it is? When you buy a food, check the ingredients label and if you start seeing a lot of stuff you don’t know, reconsider putting it into your body unless you’ve done the research on this stuff.

Buy foods from people who care about food quality.
The best way to buy food is to buy it from other people: people you can talk to and can tell you how it was made or grown or produced. Around here, I’m a big fan of the local Picket Fences Creamery. They’re local, give public tours pretty much whenever you want, maintain a blog, have “Sample Sundays” where you can stop by and try lots of the things they make, and generally wear their passion for what they do on their sleeve. They make a quality product out in the open that I can witness and know what goes into the food.

Buy local. Whenever you have a chance, buy your food from a local source, particularly one where you can literally visit the place where the food came from and follow it every step along the way. This way, you know exactly what’s in that food. You can carry that even further and have a garden yourself.

Attend a farmer’s market. I love our local farmers market – I get a lot of produce there during the right season and I’ve even considered selling something there a few times. Here are some tips for newcomers – the best advice I can give is to just go, see what’s there, and talk to people. You might even consider getting involved in a co-op, where you pay for a share of a farm and in exchange they deliver vegetables to you on a regular basis.

Set time aside for meals if at all possible, and avoid eating on the run.
One of the true highlights of my day is dinner with my family. We all sit around the dinner table – even my six month old daughter in her high chair – and we eat together with conversation. My wife and I talk about politics and current events, my son tells us about his day’s adventures at daycare (usually involving a blue truck), and my daughter usually passes around a lot of smiles and gurgles at everyone.

Taking the time to devote to food is not only spiritually fulfilling, but it can be beneficial to your diet as well.

Never eat alone. Dinner conversation is the single best way to keep you from bolting down your food. Get engaged in the conversation and eat the meal slowly – you’ll find yourself enjoying the food more and not eating as much of it.

If you must eat on the road, avoid places where they bring the food directly to your car. It’s a pretty safe rule of thumb that food preparation that is put directly into your car is probably not the healthiest choice to make. If you do have to eat on the run, bring something from home or stop at a grocery store to get something remotely healthy. A drive-thru is a dangerous place for your health, no matter how yummy it is.

In a nutshell, I think Michael Pollan nails it when he says “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Live by that and you’ll be all right.

About two months ago, I was talking about this very fact with a friend of mine who works for Hy-Vee, the large grocery store chain here in Iowa. He gave me a tip: he said to take the coupon section out of the Sunday paper and put it aside for four weeks – don’t even bother to look at it. Four weeks later, open it up and clip everything that’s even remotely of interest, whether you’d buy it normally or not.

At that point, take the wad of coupons to the store and just look at the shelves. Magically, most of those coupons you have will sync up very well with stuff that’s already on sale on the shelves. When you combine the sale price and the coupon, you’ll usually be able to get items for next to nothing.

I tried this myself, actually. I saved the flyers from mid-December and then just cut them up earlier this week to take them to the store. What did I find? About 40% of the coupons I cut out matched up with items on sale. I wound up getting T. Marzetti salad dressing for less than a dollar, a package of diapers at the cheapest rate I believe I’ve ever bought them for, and a container of quite good vanilla ice cream for $0.19 – and those are just the ones I remember.

Why does this work? Coupons in the newspaper are usually the first wave of a product push from large companies. They’ll put out coupons to start bumping up the sales, then they’ll move onto sale prices later on in the promotion. The reason for doing these in waves is so that the overall product sales trend looks solidly positive and not just a big spike with a fall-off. Plus, coupon users who use the product, like it, return to the store, and notice the item on sale are often willing to buy the item again. I’ll admit to noticing this working for me in the past with products like V-8 Fusion.

After discovering this nifty attribute, I’ve quickly moved to a big adjustment in my usual grocery shopping strategy. It no longer matters whether I “sync up” with the arrival of the Sunday paper – I just need to clip the coupons roughly a month after I receive the flyer and use them the next time I go to the grocery store.

So, as before, I make a shopping list each week. I just keep writing down staples that are getting low along with ingredients needed for any meals that I’m thinking about making. I usually use a notepad on the refrigerator for this, along with Remember the Milk.

Sometime shortly before I go, I get out a month-old coupon flyer and clip everything that might match something on my list. I’ll also clip anything that I know we can always use – like diapers – along with anything that’s a potentially reasonable purchase, like salad dressings because we often eat salad.

After that, I head out to the store when it’s convenient (often early on Saturday mornings) and use the coupons effectively. Whenever you see a sale item that you also have a coupon for, you’re usually doing quite well and can often get a pretty good item for just pennies – or at least far cheaper than the normal price and usually notably cheaper than the generic version.

This technique saved me about $20 during my last grocery store visit – compared to normal retail prices – for about thirty minutes of extra effort at the breakfast table, cutting coupons and putting together the grocery list. That $20 doesn’t include the fact that the grocery list kept me on task at the store, helping me find items I actually needed and ignore items I don’t. That’s a worthwhile frugal activity, in my opinion.

It’s completely understandable that people wish to choose the product they’re most familiar with, but it’s also an expensive choice in many cases. Generics are often prepared identically to name-brand products or are only slight variations on the name brand, but the cost is far less. Why? Advertising – with the name brand, you have to support the company’s marketing budget as well.

Yet, for many, there still remains a certain “taboo” about buying generics. If you feel that way, I encourage you to try the following things the next time you’re at the grocery store.

Find the “generic” parallel for some of your purchases. Many canned products, breakfast cereals, and so on have generic forms that are very similar. Quite often, people rush through the store and grab the name brand on instinct without actually bothering to find the generic item.

Compare the ingredients in the generic and the name brand. I was shocked when I first did this – many times, the ingredients in the two are identical – no difference at all. In a few cases, the generic was more healthy – it would have the same ingredients, but in a different order, indicating a smaller proportion of high fructose corn syrup, for example.

If there is a noticeable difference, decide whether the cost difference is worth it. Quite often, you’ll find the generic’s ingredients are just fine compared to the name brand one, even if there are some differences. For example, you might find that the name brand tomato paste has no salt in it, while the generic has a tiny amount of sodium in it. Is it worth $0.50 for that difference?

If it brings comfort to you, use the non-generic packaging at home. Something my mother used to do to reduce complaints in the morning is put generic cereal in the name brand box. I didn’t realize this for years, but if I didn’t actually witness my mother buying the cereal at the store, it was usually the generic form in the name brand box.

For most purchases, I buy the store brand – there are very few name brands that I purchase over the store brand, and the only reason I do in those cases is that I’ve tried both and the name brand has enough of a quality difference to make it worthwhile (diapers come to mind here). I also put in an effort to pore through the ads for the store and also the Sunday coupons to see if I can get a deal on the name brand that’s even cheaper than the generic – and it happens more often than you might think.

Is it healthy? Is the food low in fat and provide good nutritional quality? Is it devoid of chemicals of mysterious origin? I also include ethical issues here, such as buying from local traders and such – healthy in a different way.

Is it cheap? Is the price reasonable compared to other similar food options? Is this item going to bend my food budget?

Is it tasty? Does this look like an enjoyable item to eat? Could this be part of an enjoyable dish?

Is it quick? Is the preparation time for this food relatively small? Will preparing this food interfere with other activities in my life?

Most people in the first world will take these four factors into account when considering a food purchase, but in varying degrees. For example, I focus on healthy above all when buying food that my toddler will eat, but I often focus on tasty for myself. During my earlier years, quick was the top factor.

However, I like to find items that manage to hit as many of these areas as possible. Here are eight techniques that I use to find home run food purchases.

Read through the sales flyer before going This takes care of the cheap, letting you use the other criteria to make a judgment on the food. For example, if I see produce at a great price in the flyer, I’ll often make a point to look up a recipe for it (making it tasty and possibly quick) – this turns into a home run purchase because produce on sale is already healthy and cheap.

Stock up on herbs and spices Herbs and spices are magical – they manage to turn a bland but healthy food into a tasty concoction. It’s worth an investment in some jars of quality herbs and spices of various types because of their amazing ability to take food that is healthy and make it tasty, too. Here’s an essential collection of herbs and spices to get you started.

Figure out how to make salads you like Salads are incredibly quick to make and are also very healthy (and lettuce is often cheap), but for me they’re often lacking in the tasty department. To make this a grand slam, I spent a lot of time trying various salad dressings and toppings until discovering the things that really make a salad pop for me (mushrooms, a sprinkling of cheese, onions, homemade garlic croutons, and a touch of vinaigrette dressing). It was worth the effort – now I have a staple food that hits a grand slam for me.

Use prepackaged foods as a template Prepackaged convenience foods are very strong in terms of tasty and quick and usually cheap, but they fail terribly at healthy. Instead of grabbing your favorite convenience food, try using it as a template for preparing your own. Match the ingredients with fresh and healthy versions and make several batches at home in advance so you can prepare them quickly when it comes time.

Try unexpected things This usually comes into the cheap realm: look for inexpensive and healthy items and give them a shot. Because of this, I’ve truly discovered the joy of cucumbers and onions – just slice a few cucumbers and an onion into a bowl with one parts water and four part vinegar (plenty to cover the onions and cucumbers), dash in just a bit of salt (to taste, you can add more if you like), and put it in the fridge. This is a delicious quick snack that’s very healthy, too, and it works as an appetizer before meals – my son even loves them and will munch on a cucumber slice before the main meal.

Look for recipes adaptable to the crockpot / slow cooker (or designed for it) This somewhat solves the quick aspect by allowing you to actually prepare the food whenever you’d like. One technique worth doing is to grab one of those frozen crock pot meals from the freezer section, reading the ingredients in it, then picking them up separately (making it more healthy) – in other words, use the template tip in conjunction with the crockpot. Another one is to find some crock pot recipes in advance. Here’s a primer on the crock pot and five great recipes for it.

If you’re picking up a canned item, see if it’s fresh Looking at the canned vegetables for an upcoming meal? See if that vegetable is fresh. The same goes for fruits and for meats as well – if you can get the item sans preservatives, you’re basically making a healthier choice, likely a cheaper choice, and also likely a tastier choice.

Buy lots of staples For me, chicken breasts and tomatoes are the two best staple foods one can get. You can make chicken marinara one night, then have chicken tortilla soup the next. Using such staples is quick (you can often prepare them all at once – making tomato juice or boiling the breasts) and also healthy (you’re starting off with the basic food). Plus, they’re so adaptable that you can make all sorts of delicious dishes from them.

A bonus tip: don’t be afraid of leftovers. Instead, learn how to use spices and other techniques to rejuvenate them.

First, we do weekly checks of the level of our supplies. We check the amount of diapers, baby wipes, laundry detergent, shampoo, soap, cleaning agents, toilet paper, and so on. This is part of our normal routine for preparing our weekly shopping list – if we notice an item is getting low, we add it to the list.

Next, we check for prices on Amazon for some of the bulk items before we go shopping. We just look up the items we need on Amazon and note their prices and their sizes. Here are four examples from a recent shopping trip:

Lever 2000 Energize (our preferred soap) @ $17.41 for 24 bars, or $0.73 a bar
Pampers Cruisers (stage 4) @ 39.79 for 140 diapers, or $0.28 a diaper
Pampers Wipes @ 23.54 for 770 wipes, or $3.06 per 100 wipes
Colgate Total @ 22.41 for 6 7.8 oz. tubes, or $0.48 per ounce

Notice how we’ve broken them down into cost per unit, so we can easily make comparisons at the store. Also, to save time, we keep most of our regular purchase items bookmarked so we can quickly run through them and retrieve prices – they actually vary quite a bit, and there are times when Amazon is the better deal and our store is the better deal.

What about other brands? We generally follow Consumer Reports’ recommendations for item quality and because of that we rarely have significant problems with items not working like we hoped. Even though the prices are often higher per unit, it’s worth the additional price on such items if you’re not finding them frustrating or of low quality. That doesn’t mean we completely abandon sale items; we generally find about four or five brands of each item acceptable and will buy these if there is a significant discount.

Once we have our Amazon prices in hand, we head to the store. We generally buy most of our bulk items at a warehouse store, so we buy our bulk items there first. We usually do any needed cost-per-unit math on our cell phones and then buy the option that has the lowest cost per unit – to a degree. If the prices are very close, we usually go with Amazon because (1) they deliver to the doorstep, (2) we earn more points through them, and (3) sales tax (in some cases).

What about coupons? If we happen to have a coupon for an item, we bring it along and use it in our calculations at the store. If the item is still cheaper at Amazon, we don’t use the coupon – in fact, I’ve actually handed coupons to other shoppers in this situation that were appearing to be about to buy the item.

Doesn’t this take a lot of time? Not really. Usually, both of us go shopping (we make an activity out of it with our child, trying to instill a healthy and rational way to shop, and we usually interrupt it in the middle with a trip to a park and a picnic lunch) and one of us is looking for items while the other is calculating prices. It doesn’t really add any significant time to the equation, especially if you would actually spend any time at all comparing two items and trying to decide which one is the better deal. That’s what we do – we just have a plan when we walk in the door.

To decide which one we would go with (a significant decision, because both have membership fees in the $40 range), I took a trip to both stores in the last week, mostly to mill around, see what was available, check prices on some specific items I know we’ll buy in bulk, and then use that information to make a decision. Although Costco had some advantages (better electronics selection, somewhat nicer layout, and fresh produce while Sam’s had none), the advantages of Sam’s Club were too much to overcome. Here are seven reasons why I chose Sam’s Club over Costco.

Location, location, location Although the two stores are roughly equidistant from our future home, Sam’s Club is much closer to my daily commute. This is a significant advantage for Sam’s Club, though not a deal maker.

Diapers, diapers, diapers Sam’s Club has better diaper prices than Costco on the brand that we use (Pampers Swaddlers and Cruisers), but both are far better than the local department stores and also better than Amazon. Given that we have a child still in diapers and another one on the way in September, this is a very important factor for us.

Item selection I made a list of fifteen specific food items that we regularly buy that aren’t obvious common ones, ranging from specific fruit juices to our preferred brand of oats in bulk. Sam’s Club had a higher percentage of the specific items, and on the ones that they both had, the prices averaged out to be almost exactly even (Costco was cheaper by one cent on the total of seven items).

Help The help was highly variable in both places (depending on the person). I asked three questions of three separate people at each location. The best person at each one walked me straight to what I needed. The worst person at Sam’s Club got me to the right area quickly, then radioed for help. The worst person at Costco walked around in circles for a while, basically said that she couldn’t help me, then wandered away.

Distractions How many times did the store distract me into considering another item? This is mostly a way of seeing how the store’s layout convinces me to strongly consider items I wasn’t intending to buy or even look at when I came into the store, and the fewer such items, the better. Aside from the entrance area where I was distracted by a big screen television, I basically wasn’t distracted in Sam’s Cub – everything was spread out and open and sorted in an obvious enough fashion for the most part that I quickly found what I was looking for. In Costco, I was distracted several times – not good.

Checking out Since I was only in each store as a “guest,” I watched the checkouts for a bit and timed how long it took a few people to get through the line (I had time to burn when I made the visits, but when we have a house and another child, time will be important). The Sam’s Club checkouts were much busier (many more customers), but more checkouts opened quickly and the overall average time for both stores wound up being about the same.

Cleanliness Surprisingly (because I expected it to be the other way around), the Sam’s Club store seemed much cleaner than the Costco. Neither one was what I would describe as dirty, but the Sam’s Club had more of a “freshly-scrubbed warehouse” feel to it, whereas the Costco did not. Although this seems like an aesthetic choice, it does matter at a place where you may be buying foodstuffs.

While Costco did have a few specific advantages, Sam’s Club was the clear winner for me. Considering the membership fee is $40, the time spent figuring out which was better for me was worth the effort.

A few months ago, I decided to actually pick out the store that offers the best prices on the staples that I buy regularly so that I didn’t have to worry about always digging for bargains – I could be confident that my store had the best prices for the things I often buy. I wound up moving my shopping to a different store (a smaller chain) after doing the comparison, and I estimate that by making this change, I’m not missing out on anything at all, but I save $5 to $10 a week on groceries now without thinking about it.

Here’s the exact process I went through to figure this out. It’s pretty clever and quite simple, and you can do it with a spreadsheet program very easily.

For about six weeks, I went to a different grocery store each week. These trips were completely normal: I bought all of the normal things I buy on a grocery trip (lots of produce, meats, milk, and so forth). Even if an individual price made me cringe (this happened more than once), I would just buy what I needed anyway, because I found that almost always there was at least a handful of items at which the store was competitive. If a store didn’t have a large number of the items I wanted, I immediately decided I wouldn’t go there again.

Here’s the kicker: I saved the receipts from each of the trips. I usually enter the receipts into a money management program as soon as I get home (I use Microsoft Money) and then toss the receipts away, but instead I saved these receipts in a shoebox for later.

After the six weeks, I gathered up the receipts and did a comparison. I laid them all out side by side and looked for items that I bought at at least a majority of the six stops. This was a grouping of about fifteen items at the end. I then fired up Microsoft Excel and made a grid of these prices, awarding a score of 1 for the best price on that item down to 6 for the worst (and leaving the number blank if I didn’t buy it there). If two stores tied, I gave them both the “better” score.

After doing that, I just averaged the scores – and found a clear winner. It was actually fairly obvious as I was doing the receipts which store was going to win, but I ran the numbers anyway just to make sure.

Since then, I’ve been doing all my grocery shopping at Hy-Vee. In my area, for a married couple with a child who do a lot of cooking at home, they have the best all-around prices. The only other store chain that was even close was Fareway.

Give this simple process a try! It ended up shaving several dollars off of each grocery bill for us without any additional effort – if anything, Hy-Vee is actually slightly more convenient for shopping than our old place.

This question isn’t from the long email, but it is a great question concerning personal finance fundamentals that some of my readers might be interested in.

You keep talking about taking a calculator to the grocery store but I don’t know what to do with it or why it is useful. Shouldn’t I just buy the biggest one?

There are a lot of uses for a calculator in the grocery store. Here are three examples that shows how a calculator can be useful. Most of these examples are very basic math, but they show clearly how to use a calculator in a store to save a bit of money.

Calculating price per unit. Let’s say you want to buy Tide, but you want to get the best deal on it. One of the containers promises 52 loads for $5.99 and another one promises 96 loads for $10.99. Which one is cheaper?

This is a great time to break out your calculator. Type in 5.99, hit the divide button, type in 52, and hit the equal button. You’ll get a number that looks like 0.115192. That’s how many dollars you have to pay per load. In other words, with the 52 load container, it will cost you eleven and a half cents per load. Now, type in 10.99, hit the divide button, type in 96, and hit the equal button. You’ll get 0.114479. What does it mean? The larger one only saves you about a half a cent per load.

You’ll be surprised to find that sometimes the bulk offering is a great deal, other times it’s not much of a deal at all, and on occasion the smaller size is actually cheaper per unit.

Converting incompatible sizes. You’re checking out the toilet paper. One offers 9 rolls of paper with 150 sheets on each. The other one offers 16 rolls of paper with 88 sheets on each. Which one gives you more sheets?

Whip out the calculator and see how many sheets you get in the first package: enter 9, hit the multiply button, enter 150, and hit the equal button. You’ll see that that package gives you 1,350 sheets. How about the second one? Enter 16, hit the multiply button, enter 88, and hit the equal button. 1,408 sheets! The one with 16 rolls, even though the rolls are much smaller, gives you more sheets. You might want to compare the price per sheet to see which one is really the better deal, using the tip above.

Coupon math. I have a coupon for $1 off any package of Pampers Cruisers. There’s a 108 count box for $26 and a 144 count box for $34.50. I see that the larger box is cheaper without the coupon, and I can get another coupon for no problem. Which one is the better deal with a coupon?

Let’s figure up the first one. Enter 26, hit the minus button, enter 1, and hit the equal button. It costs $25 after the coupon. Divide that by 108 to see the cost per diaper: $0.231481. How about the other box? Enter 34.50, hit the minus button, enter 1, and hit the equal button. It costs $33.50 after the coupon. Divide that by 144 to see the cost per diaper: $0.232639. It’s actually cheaper to get the smaller package with the coupon!

Ever had to face down a $150 grocery bill? I have, and the reason was usually that I entered the grocery store without any sort of plan, wandered down every aisle trying to decide what we were going to have for supper, and ended up just buying tons of unnecessary stuff – including even some things I already had at home.

You can avoid that pain by starting a grocery list, sticking it on the refrigerator, and adding items to it as time goes on. Here’s what you do.

1. Get a magnetic note pad or make one yourself. You can get a cheap magnetic pad from Amazon, or make your own by gluing a freebie refrigerator magnet (or two or three of them) to the back of a normal pad of paper.

2. Attach a pen to the pad. Just take a pen with a cap, tie a piece of kite string around it, tape that string in place, then tape the string to the back of the pad. Done.

3. Put it on the fridge. Now, slap that pad up on the refrigerator door so you have a place to conveniently make a list.

4. Whenever you notice something you need, write it down. I often notice things we’re getting low on throughout the week, so whenever I see something that we actually need, I jot it on the top sheet of the pad.

5. Before you go to the store, think of a few meals you would like to make, see which ingredients you have, and write down the ones you don’t. This usually means planning your meals ahead a bit. My wife and I usually just identify three to four meals for the coming week and check to make sure we have all the stuff for them. Whatever we don’t have goes on the list.

6. Take the list to the store with you and stick to it as best you can. Once you’re in the store, you’ve already got a list of everything you need, so just stick with it. Don’t buy anything that’s not on the list – don’t even look at it.

This seems trivially simple, but very few people actually take a few minutes to do this and it saves a lot of money. How? By focusing on your list rather than the stuff on the shelves, you’re much less susceptible to the clever packaging and advertising of the products on the shelves – and thus you wind up with fewer unnecessary items in your cart.

Time spent: A minute here, a minute there
Money saved: $20 per store visit (that’s about what I save with weekly shopping trips, based on “before list” and “after list” comparisons)

Even though the ad is a solid little piece of entertainment, it’s also very well-designed to coerce you into remembering and buying Emerald Nuts. Let’s take a closer look at the ad to see how it works.

Around 3 PM, when your blood sugar and energy are low…

Familiarity The ad starts off in an office environment, a familiar situation for a lot of viewers. The familiarity of the office environment is why many ads are now using office situations – it allows the viewer to place themselves in the ad, and thus imagine themselves using the product.

The familiarity is even stronger, however, based on the premise of a sleepiness in the afternoon – again, a situation many can empathize with. Physiologically, most humans go through a period of drowsiness in the afternoon, so this ad uses this common experience to pull us in in another way.

some say Robert Goulet appears, and messes with your stuff.

Humor The juxtaposition of Robert Goulet in an office environment is humorous – two familiar things combined to make an unfamiliar situation is one of the basic tenets of humor. Humor grabs your attention, makes you watch, and creates a positive endorphin effect inside of you, making you feel in a positive fashion towards the product. A very similar logic applies when sex is used in an ad – it gets our blood pumping a little bit and creates a positive feeling.

A problem There’s also a problem – Goulet is causing chaos in the office. How can this problem be solved?

But the natural energy in just one handful of Emerald Nuts…

Introduce the product Emerald Nuts is a product that can solve this problem. It can cure an energy dip. How does that affect the humorous problem?

is enough to keep Robert Goulet away…

Solve the problem The guy eats some Emerald Nuts and Robert Goulet flees into the night. Thus, the product has solved the problem, both in terms of fixing the humorous situation (Goulet) and also fixing the “real” situation (the sleepiness). It’s a real problem solver, and in a situation that you’re already familiar with (the office), it seems like a great fit.

until tomorrow, anyway.

The big finish The ad finishes with a big display of the product itself at the point where your good feelings about the ad are maximized – you’ve laughed, the problem is solved, and you’ve subconsciously placed yourself in the situation. Don’t forget what created those good feelings – Emerald Nuts!

Thus, the next time you’re in the snack aisle and you see Emerald Nuts, you’ll have a faint remembrance of the positive feelings from the ad – and you just might toss a can in your shopping cart.

This is why many brand names have such loyalty – and why people spend their money to pay more for a product just because of the label. Their mind is littered with the remnants of positive feelings from advertisements, so they buy the product because they have a more positive feeling about it.

The next time you go shopping and automatically reach for a brand name, take a moment and really look at what it is – and what the competitors are also offering. You might realize that in fact the brand name is making you feel different for no tangible reason – that’s advertising at work. Remembering Robert Goulet can often help you save some money when shopping.

Welcome to Hy Vee! I went shopping at the Hy-Vee grocery store in Ankeny, Iowa, a northern suburb of Des Moines. Hy-Vee is a midwestern grocery chain that is almost ubiquitous in Iowa. There are many, many Hy-Vees in the greater Des Moines area; I like this one because it’s fairly new, very clean, and the prices are competitive right now due to a new Fareway that opened up about two blocks away. Generally, stores where a new competitor is opening nearby are a good place to shop because they trim their prices quite a bit so that when people inevitably try the new place, they’ll remember the lower prices at the other, more familiar store.

On grocery lists I prepare a grocery list before I leave the house. In this case, the list roughly matches the route I’ll take through the store, except for two items that I’m unsure about (I guessed where they were on the list). I usually head to the farthest point from the checkouts immediately and then work towards the checkout. Since the milk is in the back of the store, I head there first.

On comparing generics to name brands The first purchase I want to look at is Crystal Light, which is what my wife and I used to replace soda in our diet. It’s healthier and cheaper for us. I need to buy a variety of flavors, though, so we have enough to last a while and don’t get sick of the same flavor. Quite often, we will buy the store brand of Crystal Light, Hy-Vee Thirst Splashers, because most of the time it’s a lot cheaper per quart. Today, however, the eight quart containers of Crystal Light are on sale! The Crystal Light containers are $2 a pop, while the Thirst Splashers are $2.33 a pop. Clearly, the eight quart Crystal Light is a better deal here (and the flavors are better, too). But what about a size comparison?

The larger twelve quart size of Crystal Light is almost double the price of the eight ounce size. Clearly the eight ounce name brand is the best choice here, so I stock up on them, particularly on the flavors that we don’t usually buy because they’re not available in the generic brand.

On size comparisons I used to be of the belief that the larger size was always cheaper per ounce, but in fact this is not true on a pretty regular basis. Here, I’m shopping for Life cereal (my favorite cereal which I eat for breakfast multiple times a week). Here, you can clearly see that the 21 ounce box of Life cereal costs $3.88. I happen to have a coupon for fifty cents off, but I’ve bought Life pretty often, and I know even without calculating that it’s pretty high per ounce, even with the coupon, so I keep walking.

Not much further down, things get better for me and my Life cereal. Here is a 15 ounce box for $2.00. With my coupon, that makes it only $1.50 for a box. I pounce and toss a box in my cart, even though I find the child on the box somehow vaguely disconcerting.

My wife, on the other hand, insists on Special K cereal. Here, I have a 12 ounce box of Special K for $3.66. That comes out to $0.305 per ounce. However, I also have a coupon for 50 cents off a box of Special K. With that coupon, it’s $0.263 per ounce. Is that better than the larger size?

Right next to the first Special K box, we have a 16.7 ounce box of Special K for $4.98. That makes it $0.2982 per ounce, cheaper than the smaller box. With the coupon, though, it’s $0.2683 per ounce, which is more expensive per ounce than the smaller box. So which do I choose? I go with the absolute cheapest rate I can get per ounce, which happens to be the smaller box with the coupon. If I didn’t have the coupon with me, it would have been the larger box.

In short, a pocket calculator can be really really useful at the grocery store. I usually make several such calculations on a shopping trip, ones that are close enough that I can’t quickly determine with just a glance which is the best deal.

On shopping with children Near the end of the trip, I was walking down an aisle toward the checkout when my son spotted his favorite snack in the whole world: goldfish crackers. He nearly dove out of the cart reaching for them. He doesn’t eat them at a very high rate, though, so the big packages get stale before he gets through them. Thus, we buy small packages of them. We also buy him the whole grain kind because it’s better for his digestive system.

Of course, the problem is that he wants something that’s not necessarily a need. Although he’s young enough now that he doesn’t realize that there is a cost for these items, I do want to teach him that just because he wants something, he doesn’t always get it, either. This happens to be about the twentieth thing he’s almost dove out of the cart for, though, and when I’ve walked away from other things, he has been perfectly fine with it. He also happens to be nearly out of goldfish crackers; we have a plastic goldfish container in his diaper bag, which I checked and saw that it was empty.

After picking up the goldfish, he’s distracted for the rest of the shopping trip just by playing with the bag. Was it a good choice? He was out of crackers, after all, but I still felt like I bought him something he didn’t need. I suppose, though, if my biggest guilt during a shopping trip is buying a bag of whole grain goldfish crackers that cost less than two dollars for my son when he’s out of crackers … well, I must be doing something right.

Hopefully, you learned something from this trip. Let me know if you enjoyed it, or if you have any ideas for future photo diaries.

Here’s how it happened. I started making a monthly “food budget,” where I decided to cap my monthly spending on all food, whether it be eating out or eating at home. Each month, I’ve tightened the screws on it just a bit to keep me thinking on my toes and planning ahead. This has had a few interesting effects:

First, I eat at home way more often. I rarely eat out any more. Instead, I prepare my food at home. The stuff I prepare at home isn’t necessarily healthy, but it is more healthy than pretty much anything one can get eating out without spending good money.

Second, I take my lunch to work. I used to eat out with coworkers almost every day, and it was almost unhealthy. Now, I bring my own lunch, consisting of leftovers or of foods I’ve already prepared for myself

I also buy much less prepared food at the grocery store. With a well-stocked kitchen full of basic staples, it becomes easy to prepare your own meals instead of relying on meals that are prepackaged. Most of my shopping now happens in the produce and fresh foods section of the grocery store, meaning I’m buying stuff that already has much less fat in it than I was buying before.

In the last three months, I’ve lost about ten pounds, with the only changes in relation to my diet and exercise being the food budget. A real interesting side effect, if I do say so myself.

So how does one get started? Many people are quite scared of cooking real meals for themselves; it seems messy and time-intensive and so they order take-out or make prepackaged meals. The amazing part is if you do it right, cooking at home can be very non-time intensive. I recommend reading How To Cook Everything by Mark Bittman. It’s a long book, but one that starts off with almost no assumptions about you and the kitchen; the first recipe is popcorn, for example. It’s also full of instruction on basic techniques.

Don’t worry about choosing recipes that are “healthy,” especially if you’re just getting started with the transition into making your own meals at home. Most home recipes are better than the average prepackaged meal and almost all of them are better than the average take-out meal.

If you make a few basic things, start saving some money, and start feeling good about yourself, I’d recommend a stocking your kitchen well and moving on to more complicated recipes. There will eventually come a moment where it begins to seem easy, and you’ll eventually find some recipes that just make your mouth melt that just don’t take very long at all (like my rosemary-encrusted chicken breasts). Plus, since you’re doing it at home, you’re in control of what it costs and how healthy it is.

Disclaimer: One of my greatest passions (besides personal finance, of course) is cooking. Please, don’t encourage me to start a cooking blog, too, because I just might do it and then my family would never see me.

The biggest problem is that many people do not have a well-stocked kitchen that is geared toward this purpose, so they often end up having to buy a lot of ingredients when they decide to actually try cooking something at home. Not only is it a new and challenging experience, it also seems very expensive because one has to buy so many ingredients.

Now, if you ask me, a well-stocked kitchen should include an incredible amount of staples (and that’s not even a full list of what I’d want on hand – think more herbs and spices). But let’s face it: that’s just not realistic for a lot of people who are just getting started with cooking at home. They want a small investment and the ability to turn out tasty meals without too much concern.

How does this save money? Each time you prepare a meal at home, it is less expensive than eating out. When you have staple foods on hand, it is much easier to prepare a meal at home, and thus you are more likely to prepare something at home than to eat out. $100 is actually a very small investment in your kitchen, since it only takes ten or so meals at home instead of eating out to make up for the cost of the staples.

Here’s my shopping list for bare-bones kitchen essentials. If you have these on hand, you should be well-prepared to produce many dishes, and your food shopping should be reduced to buying perishables, including meats and cheeses and fruits and such. Plus, you’ll discover before long how much tastier home-prepared food is.

Baking
Baking powder
Baking soda
Brown sugar (actually useful in many things)
Corn meal
Corn starch
Vanilla
White sugar
Yeast

Herbs and spices
Basil
Black pepper
Cayenne pepper
Cinnamon
Garlic
Nutmeg
Oregano
Rosemary
Sage
Salt
Tarragon (maybe not essential, but my favorite spice)
Thyme

Oils, Stocks, Condiments
Beef stock
Chicken stock
Lemon juice
Mustard
Olive oil
Parmesan cheese
Red wine
Sherry
Soy sauce
Tomato paste
Vegetable oil
Vinegar
White wine