Over the last month, Sarah and I have been experimenting with a longer period between grocery store trips.

Prior to this month, we had almost always done a weekly grocery store visit, usually on Saturday but occasionally on Sunday or Monday. This enabled us to do a single week meal plan, a process I described in detail a while back.

Simply put, we would just make a list of all of the meals we would make during the upcoming week, then we would buy groceries to fulfill those meals, along with staples like milk and so on.

Over the past few weeks, however, we’ve made a commitment to extend that period between grocery store visits for several reasons.

First, our pantry has a lot of stuff in it that needs to be used up. It’s almost full to the brim and it would be very good for us to use the stored food before some of it goes bad, such as the half-full container of quinoa or the egg noodles or the spices we purchased several months ago. This is purely a money-saving tactic, of course.

Second, our time constraints are different now. Sarah has returned to work and our two oldest children have a bevy of evening activities. This makes preparing a fresh meal from scratch every evening substantially more difficult than it was during the summer or when Sarah was off on maternity leave.

Third, we wanted to really explore options for make-ahead meals. Lately, we’ve been looking carefully at meals that we can make mostly in advance and store for the future. We want to try making a diversity of meals this way, from soups and stews to casseroles and pizzas.

Finally, we want to prolong the magic of our garden as we enter fall. If we can take some of those vegetables and use them in meals that we can use down the road, we’re extending the life of the fresh vegetables in our garden without putting them to waste. If we can use three more onions and three more tomatoes from our garden, that’s a good thing.

The end result of all of this is that over the last month, we’ve only been to the grocery store twice. How did we do it? Here are some of the specific tactics we used.

We switched to drinking water with our meals. This is something I’ve always done, but my wife and my two oldest children consistently drink skim milk with their evening meal. A month ago, we switched. The exception to this is our youngest child, whose pediatrician recommended that we keep him on whole milk for a while longer. Thus, we buy whole milk just for him, which lasted perfectly for two weeks twice now.

We’ve tried making double batches of almost every meal. If I make a homemade pizza, I make another one for the freezer. If we make soup, we store an extra batch of it in a gallon-sized freezer container. If we make a casserole, we make another one for the freezer. If we make burritos, we make a bunch of extra ones for the freezer.

We’ve tried to base meals on the items we have in our pantry. What can we do with a lot of quinoa and barley? How can we use a half a pound of ground tarragon? What can we do with this buckwheat flour? These are all questions we’ve considered over the last month or so – and most of them have come to good answers.

The end result of these methods is that for the month of August 15 to September 15, our grocery bill was about 50% lower than our average month of groceries. At the same time, we’ve also banked several meals into the freezer that we’ll be able to use in future months. (Yes, part of that reduction was due to an influx of vegetables from the garden, but not nearly all of it.)

The biggest reason why this has happened, in my opinion, is that we’re drastically reducing our impulse buys. Even with a grocery list, we usually tend to make a few impulse buys on each grocery store visit. This not only saves us money, but it also helps with our health as well.

Time, money, health – this move is a triple win, in my eyes.

The post Spreading Out Your Grocery Shopping appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

For example, our local Sam’s Club often carries these giant 24 packs of sandwich buns. I’ve learned the hard way that if I buy one of these packs for just my family, we’re either eating nothing but sandwiches for several meals in the near future or they’re going to either get very hard or moldy. On the other hand, if I’m having guests over, is it worth it to buy one of these?

The same thought process repeats itself over and over again as I shop there. Am I going to be able to use all of this before it goes bad?

Flour. Lemon juice. Carrots. Watermelon. Pretzels. Brown sugar. Broccoli. Cherries. The list goes on and on. (Of course, there are the things you can pretty much store forever, like laundry detergent or dishwashing detergent or toilet paper or paper towels.)

To put it simply, if you’re not careful, your cart can quickly fill up at a warehouse club. Warehouse clubs are full of products that you use at a very good price point per unit. A cup of detergent at the warehouse club is almost always cheaper than a cup of detergent at the local grocery store.

Similarly, if you’re not careful, the stuff you buy at a warehouse club can go bad before you use it, wasting your time, your space, and especially your money. Take a pound of grapes. The price per pound at a warehouse club is less than it is at your local grocery store. The problem is that at the warehouse club, you have to buy five pounds of grapes to get that per-unit price. If you don’t use those grapes, then the leftover grapes go to waste and you end up wasting money.

It’s a balancing act, and it’s one that requires you to be in touch with what you actually need, not what you think you need or that you merely want.

Here are some tactics I use for shopping at a warehouse club.

First, I tend to buy the vast majority of my non-perishable items there. Trash bags, paper towels, toilet paper, shampoo, soap, razor blades, light bulbs – these things are almost always far cheaper at a warehouse club than at a grocery store. The only drawback is that you do have to have a place to store this stuff. We store much of our excess in the garage.

For my perishable food items, I rely entirely on my grocery list. Of course, this grocery list is based on a meal plan that accounts for the number of guests we intend to have at each meal throughout the week.

To make it simple, If we’re using the same item multiple times during the week or we’re having a number of guests, then I will buy perishable food items at a warehouse club. Otherwise, I just won’t buy it there. An item is not a bargain if you end up having to throw half of it away because it’s stale, rotten, or otherwise unusable.

My usual shopping plan for the week involves making a “warehouse club” list and making a “regular” list. Items that I’m sure I’ll be able to thoroughly use if I buy in bulk go on the “warehouse club” list. Everything else goes on the “regular” list.

I don’t even take the “regular” list into the warehouse club. Inevitably, if I do, I wind up buying something in bulk that I shouldn’t be buying in bulk. When I buy something in bulk that I shouldn’t be buying in bulk, I often end up wasting the excess and losing money.

To put it simply, I make the bulk-buying decision on each item before I ever go to the store. This way, I’m never caught in the trap of convincing myself to buy something in bulk that will go to waste. This keeps money in my pocket and space in my cupboard.

The post Waste Not, Want Not: Strategies for Warehouse Club Shopping appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

For me, this approach to meal planning was vastly different than the way I once did it and, to be frank, it took some getting used to. I tend to learn such things through repetition and example, seeing what others have done and simply trying it myself until it becomes natural and normal.

With that in mind, this week, as I was working on my family’s meal plan, I decided to simply make a post outlining the entire process, from meal plan to grocery list, so you can see clearly how the entire process works and perhaps imitate it yourself for food preparation in your own home.

Getting the Flyers
Many grocery store chains carry digital copies of their flyers on their websites. If your preferred grocery store does not, you can often find a copy of that week’s grocery store flyer inside a copy of the Sunday newspaper in your area.

I tend to use digital flyers for the grocery stores I most often visit. I tend to split my grocery shopping between Fareway and Hy-Vee – the former has the best prices on many goods, but the latter often has a better selection for specific items I might need. Since I often do the bulk of my grocery shopping at Fareway with just a quick stop at Hy-Vee at the end of the trip to pick up what I couldn’t find at Fareway, I check the websites of both stores for flyers (hyvee.com and fareway.com).

Identifying Interesting Items
As I browse through the flyers for each store, I try to look for items that are either on sale low enough that they stand out to me or ones that stand out for flavor reasons, inspiring me to get into the kitchen and cook. I tend to particularly focus on produce deals.

In the current flyer at fareway.com, I found these sales worth noting:
Navel oranges, ten cents each
Fresh broccoli, $1.49 lb.
Baby portabellas, $1.29 lb.
Red potatoes, $1.99 for 5 lb. bag

In the current flyer at hyvee.com, I found these sales worth noting:
Asparagus, $2.97 lb. (expensive out of season, but sounds delicious)
Mild yellow onions, $1.39 for 3 lb. bag
Baby red potatoes, $0.69 lb.

Finding and Choosing Recipes
I know that I need to plan for five dinners in the coming week, as well as making sure that we have things on hand for breakfasts (like plenty of oatmeal, for example) and a few items for backup lunches in case we don’t have enough leftovers to cover our lunches.

I usually use a recipe search engine like allrecipes, putting in the interesting ingredients I found above to search for simple recipes I can make that the family would like (with an eye toward my own dietary needs, too). I often also go through our cookbooks and recipe box to see if we have anything interesting that matches well.

I wound up with several recipes worth using, including a portabella penne, an asparagus ratatouille that lets me use the leftover tomatoes from some cooking last week, and a recipe that I’ll be using in my Friday meal post.

Building a Meal Plan and a Master Ingredient List
I usually come up with an actual meal plan at this point, slotting in the various meals for various nights. The biggest reason for doing this is so that I can be sure to use the fresher ingredients as quickly as possible, to plan ahead in terms of tasks that need to be done (like soaking beans overnight), and to make sure I can roll over elements easily from one meal to the next, like having both meals with onions close enough together that any extra chopped onion doesn’t go bad in the fridge.

I also prepare what I call a “master ingredient list.” This is basically a list of all of the ingredients in this week’s recipes sorted by the place where I’d find it in our kitchen – refrigerator, freezer, top pantry shelf, etc.

I do all of this on the computer, usually using Google Docs. It’s much easier to just type all of this stuff out than it is to actually write it down.

Turning the Ingredient List into a Grocery List
When I have a “master ingredient list,” I take it around the house to each of the places I’ve grouped things by on the list, then I cross off the things we already have. This also makes me check up on the quantity of stuff we use frequently, like milk, and encourages me to add such things to the list.

Once I’m done hitting the spots in our kitchen, the grocery list is ready to go. Conveniently, it’s already pretty well organized, as I marked the sale items on the list so I know what store to buy it in, and all of the refrigerator and freezer stuff is already grouped together for me.

I simply hit the grocery store, unpack everything, and then just follow that meal plan throughout the busy week.

The post Using Grocery Flyers to Plan Meals appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Cut Your Grocery Bill in Half is the follow-up to America’s Cheapest Family, a very solid book on frugality by Steve and Annette Economides from 2007 that I quite liked.

Cut Your Grocery Bill in Half seems to be a detailed expansion of the second chapter of their first book. The focus here is on groceries – mostly food shopping, but a little bit of overlap on buying other household products.

Is there really enough juice in that topic to fill up an entire book?

1. Cut Your Grocery Bill in Half (or More)
The book opens by making clear the fact that changing your grocery shopping habits isn’t a magic wand that will instantly reduce the costs. Instead, it’s a combination of techniques, most of which become both easier and more effective with practice and repeated use. In other words, saving money on groceries will seem like a ton of work for less savings than you expect at first, but as the tactics become more familiar and natural, they’ll take less time and effort and earn more savings. I’ve certainly found this to be true in my own life.

2. The Power of the Plan
A grocery list. A meal plan. A pantry inventory. These are all tools that make it a lot easier to maximize your grocery dollar, but they all required advance work and planning before you go anywhere near a grocery store. Successful grocery shopping – at least in terms of bang for the buck – relies a lot on doing advance work. Of course, this advance work also saves you a lot of time when you’re actually in the store.

3. Shopping to Win
Here, the authors list a big collection of specific grocery saving strategies, devoting a page or two of text to each one. They’re quite varied, which means that some will be useless to you and some will be home runs but the two groups will be different for each person. The one I like is the one about aged beef – beef is often better with some aging, provided that you prepare it well when it’s actually ready in your kitchen.

4. Couponing – One of Many Ways to Save
Some people swear by it. Others find it useless. My take? Couponing works to a small extent as a component of a lot of other strategies. My opinion is that people often refer to couponing when they’re referring to a big pile of interacting strategies, of which actual coupon use is just one part. The authors address the big complaint that many people use against coupons, which is that they encourage unhealthy eating habits. They make a very good point countering that – coupons don’t cause bad eating habits, people do. Just because a coupon exists for an unhealthy food doesn’t mean you have to use it.

5. Cooking That Will Save You Time, Mone, and Sanity
This chapter is another big list of specific saving ideas (devoting about a page to each one), this time focused on cooking. Buy in bulk. Cook once a month and freeze. Spice, spice, spice. Cook with your spouse. Start a “meal swap” club (something we’re trying to get started… and something I’ll discuss in a future post).

6. Stocking Up and Organizing – Store It, Find It, Use It
If you buy lots of stuff in bulk, how do you find it when you need it? A big key to all of this is keeping the stuff you have on hand organized so you know what you have and can find it when you need it. The best way to do this is to simply keep an ongoing pantry list, where you list all of the food items you have stored along with notes on where to find them. You can also use this list when making a meal plan or a grocery list so you know what you have on hand without digging in the cupboard. Microsoft Excel is a great tool for this.

7. Economizing Equipment – Powerful Money-Saving Tools
It’s good to have some basic tools on hand to make cooking easier. The Economides list a lot of different items here, most of which I agree with. Surprisingly, one of the best things we’ve ever purchased is our KitchenAid stand mixer, which we use for all kinds of things from making homemade bread to preparing mashed potatoes and cookie batter. I’m also a big believer in eventually getting very good, very durable kitchen equipment. A Teflon-coated pan hits the trash in a few years, but a cast iron pot is forever.

8. Family Dinnertime – Building a Stronger Family at the Dinner Table
It’s statistically proven: families that eat dinner together have lower incidence rates of teenage pregancy and juvenile delinquency. If you have children – or even if you’re married without children – strive to eat dinner together and, ideally, prepare it together. Meals can be a very social event that goes far beyond the direct nutrition you put into your body.

9. Feeding Your Kids for Less
What do you do when you have a family full of mouths to feed? Have lots of low-cost snacks (what fruits are on sale this week?) and involve your children in the whole process of meals, from planning to shopping to preparation to setting the table, so they gain an appreciation for the whole process. Our oldest kids are four and three and we’re already integrating them into this process.

10. Where and How to Eat Out for Less
The easiest solution for saving while eating out is to not eat out. However, that’s not the ultimate answer for many, so how do you do it? This chapter offers a lot of advice – don’t be afraid to use coupons, take home a doggy bag, go simple with the beverages (I recommend water), don’t get “upsold” to more expensive versions of what you ordered, and so on. The best solution really is to just not eat out, even at a very “cheap” place (where you’re getting really dodgy food quality).

11. Gardening – Grow It Yourself and Be Healthy
Gardening can also save a lot of money, not just in the produced vegetables, but in the extremely low cost entertainment it can provide for many hours during the summer. The trick is to grow a variety of vegetables and, when you have excess, to store them properly by freezing them and/or canning them. There’s nothing better in January than having many pounds of garden-fresh tomatoes canned or frozen, just ready for use.

Is Cut Your Grocery Bill in Half Worth Reading?
If you’ve never even thought about your grocery bill and your dining out bill as ways to really save money, this book will be a home run for you. Many of the techniques you can use to trim your grocery bill are quite easy and this is a spectacular collection of such tips.

On the other hand, if you’re an experienced frugal grocery shopper and food preparer, you’ll find a lot of tips that make you say “No kidding?!” with a few tips here or there that will be of use to you mixed throughout the book. If you’re willing to search for some treasure, this one will still be a worthwile read.

I found several interesting ideas in the book that we’re going to try, even if many of the tips felt like repetition of the things we already do. Does that make for a good book? I say yes, because it has ideas for beginners and old hands alike.

The post Review: Cut Your Grocery Bill in Half appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Think about it for a minute. What reasons do you have for shopping at one store over another? Is it purely the prices? What about the location – is it because it’s close to your home? Cleanliness (like my Aldi story a while back)? Store organization? Convenience? Shopper rewards programs? How they treat their employees? How their company behaves? Availability of certain specific goods? Cost to get in the door (a la Costco and Sam’s Club and B.J.’s)?

All of these (and more) are factors when you choose where to shop. Some stores are going to excel in one area or another and do poorly in other areas. A store that excels on prices will often tank in other areas, like employee treatment (like Wal-Mart). A store that excels on prices and employee treatment fails on cost of admission and organization (like Costco). Experiences in some of these areas will also vary from place to place.

My choice of store centers around a handful of factors. At minimum, a store has to have a certain level of cleanliness or I’ll turn around and walk out.

I won’t bother to go more than about three miles farther than the nearest grocery store to shop, but that rule includes Hy-Vee, Wal-Mart Supercenter, Aldi, Fareway, Dahl’s, Sam’s Club, Super Target, and Cub Foods, so there’s plenty of choice in that range.

I tend to prefer stores where it’s easy to find what I want – the more bad experiences I have wandering around trying to find something, the less likely I am to come back, even if the prices are great. After that, prices rule, in my book.

I’m not too worried about the shopper’s reward policies or their corporate behavior, and the cost of entry issue mostly comes down to “do I save money over the long run.”

What am I left with? I have a handful of stores I prefer to shop at (topped by Fareway) and another handful I’ll stop at for specific sales or specific items.

That’s great and all, but why am I writing about this?

First of all, the sticker price is rarely the bottom line. Almost always, if I strictly chase the absolute lowest price on an item, I end up costing myself more because of the additional costs.

For example, I won’t drive an extra ten miles (and spend that extra time) to save an extra dollar. The automobile wear-and-tear and maintenance costs will eat the savings and you’ll have spent a chunk of an hour chasing that imaginary dollar. I’ll happily spend an extra dollar at a different store to save me that twenty minutes and the wear on the car.

Second, a bit of planning trumps most of the other factors. Be patient on your staples, for example, and don’t be afraid to buy a lot of them when the right price comes along. This requires some planning, of course, but it allows you to buy the items you need from locations that are acceptable for you, ethically or otherwise.

An example: I would have to drive significant extra mileage to hit a CVS (around here, DrugTown is the most common drugstore chain) in order to take advantage of their bargains. What I’ve learned, though, is that patience, planning, and coupon use often trumps their bargains elsewhere, which enables me to not have to spend time and money traveling to CVS to get a “bargain.”

So what’s the best solution?

For me, it’s simply a matter of knowing and using a small handful of local stores, being patient, and hitting the good sales there hard.

Knowing two or three local stores makes them convenient and increases my ability to find things in those stores, making shopping trips faster (and time is money).

It also allows me to narrow my searches for sales. I only really pay attention to a few different grocery store flyers when planning my grocery shopping. I pay attention to coupons, but only in the sense of “this is a coupon for a staple, let’s clip it and see if it eventually matches a store sale.” This attitude saves a ton of time.

In a nutshell, patience trumps “super” bargains for me in that it saves me time and allows me to be choosy about where I shop so I can take advantage of the other aspects of grocery shopping (like convenience and being able to easily find items).

The post What You’re Buying When You Go to a Store appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Why exactly do I skimp so hard on some items but spend so much more on the others? How is that frugal in any way?

Here’s the thing: it’s all about the value I get from the item, which may or may not be the same as the value you get from the item. And that may be different than the value someone else gets from that item.

Take the generic baking soda. Baking soda is sodium bicarbonate, whether you buy it with an Arm and Hammer logo or with a generic source. There is no extra value, from my perspective, from buying name-brand baking soda. I’m happy to save $0.25 on a box here.

Then we go to the milk aisle, where I’m likely to pick organic milk that is completely free of artificial hormones. To me, the extra dollar or two per gallon that I pay for this is well worth it, as it greatly reduces my children’s exposure to rBS and rBGH, which can alter their development and trigger puberty earlier (among other effects), and the cows do not consume feed treated with pesticides, which shows up in small amounts in non-organic milk. This has a value to me that’s worth paying extra for. This may or may not be your value.

As we walk down the aisle with the garbage bags, I don’t choose the generic, nor do I choose the expensive one. I choose whatever bag is recommended as a “best buy” from the most recent Consumer Reports rundown of trash bags that I’ve read. Why? Because a ripped garbage bag is a big mess that I don’t want to deal with – and generics often rip – but the expensive bags don’t really add anything extra.

Naturally, with all of these choices, I tend to stock up when they’re on sale or I have a coupon.

What process led me to these choices? It’s a pretty simple one.

First, I make my buying decisions outside of the store. If you’re trying to decide which one to get when you’re standing in the store, the psychology of store marketing is going to be at work. Carefully designed packaging and familiar name brands will play a big role in determining what you buy.

If something’s on my list, I usually know the exact brand I’m going to buy before I walk into the store. That way, I’m not spending time standing there idly trying to decide between several options, because that’s when marketing takes effect.

Second, if I don’t know exactly what I’m going to buy, I research it. Consumer Reports is one of my first stops, but I tend to use a lot of different sources. I want to know the ins and outs of everything that I buy, even down to the $0.99 stuff.

Third, if I can’t explain why I would specifically need a higher-cost version, I buy the generic. With the baking soda, I can’t see a reason to spend extra money to get an Arm and Hammer logo. With the garbage bags, I’m buying the “best buy” bags because I do not want the bags to rip – it’s not a mess I want to deal with. With the milk, I’m buying the organic milk for the family health reasons stated above.

This holds true for every item on my list. If I know what value I want from the item and I’ve done a bit of research, I know what version I’ll be buying. I don’t have to look at nine different kinds of diapers or twenty six boxes of cereal to decide which one I want. I’ve already done much of the shopping outside of the store.

This has another big benefit: this, along with a shopping list, drastically reduces the time spent inside a store. I basically move most of my grocery store time out of the store to my home, where I can make my own list and do my own research without all of the marketing distractions in the store.

The end result? I don’t go into a store until I know exactly what I’m going to buy there. That makes it easy to go through the store very quickly. I fill my cart with the stuff I want that delivers what I want and maximizes the value I get for the money I spend. Even better, my time for impulse buys is almost eliminated.

That’s how we’re rolling through the grocery store this morning. How about you?

The post Finding Your Own Value Balance at the Grocery Store appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

After the shopping was over, though, I left the store in a painful daze. It had actually taken far longer than it ever should have – and the shopping list was the big problem.

First of all, the items weren’t categorized well. There were several fresh fruits and vegetables on the list, but they were often separated by things like flour and spices and eggs and milk – items in completely different parts of the store.

Second, some of the items were simply names of complete recipes that we knew well. In a rush to complete the list (which, as I mentioned above, was closer to notes for a meal plan), Sarah simply jotted down two complete recipes by name that we both know cold. Of course, in the store, that means spending the time to think about the items required for the recipe – and also possibly buying extras of a particular item.

Third, the list annotations were unclear. Sarah had included a few notes that would have made perfect sense to her – but didn’t make any sense at all to me. I made some valiant guesses and, in a few cases, made the right guess, but I spent a lot of time puzzling them out and quite often I made the wrong guess.

Why is this an issue worth writing a post about?

First of all, it cost time. I spent a bunch of extra time in the store because of the items on this list, whether it was simply trying to figure out what they are or rushing from one end of the store to the other to find them.

Second, it cost us money. I bought a couple of unnecessary items along the way due to redundancy and also due to not understanding the list fully.

Third, it convinced me to make a few impulse buys. As I spent so much time wandering back and forth in the store, I was continually exposed to shelf after shelf of items that weren’t on my list and I didn’t need. Thanks to that exposure, I bought at least two unnecesary items.

So, how can I solve this problem? My goal, quite simply, is to save as much time and money as possible compared to this shopping trip. Here’s the plan I put in place.

First, I made a bunch of custom blank meal plan sheets. These are basically sheets that enable us to fill in full meal plans for the week ahead. These can easily be stuck on the fridge with a magnet, enabling us to fill in the blanks as we so wish.

Second, I made a bunch of custom blank grocery lists. Instead of just using a blank sheet of paper, I made a sheet that had a few distinct groups on it – “fresh fruits and vegetables,” “dairy products,” “meat counter,” “bread aisle,” and “other,” to be specific. If an item falls under one of the first four categories, we put it there. Otherwise, it goes in the “other” area.

Third, nothing gets added to the grocery list unless it’s out until we’re ready to go to the store. The only thing we put on the list during the week are items that we’re out of (or very close to depleting). This way, there is no confusion about what’s on the list.

Finally, the meal plan is finished (and the grocery list completed from the meal plan) just before we leave to go shopping. By keeping all complete meal ideas on the meal plan and not on any grocery lists, no one will have to stand in the store and piece through what the ingredients are for “jambalaya.”

What I learned from all of this is simple: doing that prep work ahead of time actually saves time in the store, and it certainly saves money, too. I learned this the hard way from that day with the confusing list.

The post Optimizing Your Grocery List appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Two years ago, I thought this would be a fun tradition to continue with my own son, so I went out to the store a few days before Christmas. What did I find? Amazingly low prices on oranges. I don’t remember the exact price, but I bought multiple pounds of oranges, took them home, and made fresh orange juice out of them.

It turns out that December really is the cheapest time of the year to buy oranges. That’s because orange crops tend to be heavily harvested just as the winter months begin because oranges are very sensitive to freezing and, although oranges grow in very warm climates, freezing during the winter months is still a concern.

This same phenomenon holds for almost every kind of produce. To put it simply, produce is cheapest during the typical harvest season for that crop. Often, there are secondary products that see a price decline as well: for example, gardening supplies tend to go on sale at the same time that gardens are being harvested in your area.

Knowing this schedule and planning ahead a bit can be a big boon to your food budget. Obviously, seasonal food calendars are never exact because of both the vagaries of your local area as well as the year-to-year variations in food crops and in temperatures, but here are ten rules of thumb I use for my own fresh produce purchases (well, at least as fresh as I can acquire in northern Iowa).

Asparagus – late April and early May
Broccoli – late February and March
Cauliflower – late March and April
Cranberries – October
Oranges (all but Valencia) – December
Raspberries – mid-August
Strawberries – late June through early August
Sweet Corn – early August to early September
Turnips – February
Watermelon – July

These aren’t so much learned from my own garden but learned from when local stores tend to put produce on sale.

How do I take advantage of this?

One, I save recipes and meal ideas. If I have some ideas for asparagus, I save those asparagus ideas until the asparagus appears discounted and very fresh in late April. Out of season, the asparagus isn’t nearly as fresh and it’s also much more expensive. The same holds true for a lot of produce.

Two, I freeze some of the items. Many fruits and vegetables can be frozen and later thawed for meal use – sometimes the texture is a bit altered, but the flavor is always tremendous. If we do this, I just soak the items in water for a bit, then freeze them individually on a tray in the freezer. Once they’re frozen, I’ll put them in a bag or other container together and clearly label them. If you freeze them individually like this, they tend to not stick together (much) in other containers, making them easy to use later on.

This type of planning lets us get our fill of the produce in season, plus often try a few recipes again at the opposite point of the year. So, for example, we’ll often thaw asparagus in October or November for a recipe or two.

Three, it all comes back to using the grocery flyer. If I hang onto asparagus ideas, for example, I don’t even have to think about them until I see that asparagus is on sale. If that sale matches up with my rule of thumb about when those items should be fresh and on sale, I’ll spring at the opportunity to not only get a delicious fresh ingredient on sale, but also to use those ideas I’ve been storing up.

Plan ahead a little with your food and you’ll wind up saving a lot.

The post Why Are Oranges Always on Sale in December? Seasonal Food Sales and How to Take Advantage of Them appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Salads before dinner are a common staple at our house. For a long time, we would buy lots of different dressings and other items to complement the salad. While planning for a grocery trip a few weeks ago, we realized that we were about to spend fifteen dollars or so on salad accompaniments (because several of our items were depleted). We decided to try some different tactics to drastically reduce our spending on salad.

Avoid Prepackaged Greens
Many people buy prepackaged bags of salad greens – they’re convenient and provide a variety of greens. We did the same until we started running the numbers and realized we could buy enough greens for a week’s worth of salads from the fresh area, mix them ourselves, and not only eat fresher, but save some money, too. All you have to do is select two or three fresh greens that seem interesting – lettuce, arugula, spinach, etc. – and take them home. Wash them up, put all of them in a lidded bowl, and mix it thoroughly. Then pop that bowl in the fridge. It’ll last for several days and, if you eat salad every day, you’ll blow right through it.

Make Your Own Croutons
This is stupendously easy and quite tasty. Just take about half a loaf of bread and cut each slice into cubes. In another bowl, put some olive oil (about three tablespoons or so – you can put in more if you want) and add whatever spices you want – grated Parmesan cheese, garlic powder, dried oregano. Mix the spices and oil, then dredge the cubes through the oil. Toss them on a baking sheet, turn the oven to about 300 F (140 C), and bake them for about twenty minutes. These croutons will keep practically forever in the cupboard in a sealed container.

Make Your Own Dressing
Most dressing recipes are really simple, too, and you can make quite a lot of it for pennies. AllRecipes has a huge list of dressing recipes, but my favorite is cucumber dressing. Just take a cup of buttermil and add a tablespoon of brown mustard and a teaspoon of lemon juice. Then take a cucumber and grate it, adding about half a cup of the grated cucumber to the mix. Sprinkle on some black pepper, mix it, and keep it in a jar in the refrigerator – it’ll last a long while. That’s how I like it, but other people add things like minced green onions, minced parsley, dried dill, and minced celery.

Make Salad a Routine
Salad can be a very healthy addition to any meal, since it’s primarily just greens. I like to just eat a big pile of lettuce with about two tablespoons of dressing and a few croutons to start off a meal.

Of course, the real kicker is that, with these changes, salad is actually really inexpensive compared to the cost of the entree. So make a simple change to your diet – start each meal with a salad. This way, you can prepare less of the entree. Not only does this save you money in the short term at the grocery store, it can be the foundation of a much healthier diet.

I Hate Salad!
I used to hate salads, but I found that when I started trying lots of salad variations, I found greens that I like. Today, I love nothing more than a mix of spinach and arugula – I don’t really like lettuce at all, which was a big reason I didn’t like salads as a kid. Similarly, I kept trying different dressings until I found some that I really like (like the cucumber one above). You might like something different – there’s an almost infinite variety of dressings.

Keep trying and you’ll likely find some combination that you like. When you find that combination (or find several, hopefully), remember them and use them as ways to open your meals. It’s one of those things that’s a win from almost any perspective.

The post Simple Ways to Save Money on Salads appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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.

The post The Truth About Grocery Store Flyers appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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.

The post Living and Saving in the Moment appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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.

The post Using Consumer Reports to Assemble Your Grocery List appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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!

The post Is Your Local Warehouse Store Worth Your While? Here’s How to Find Out appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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!

The post How to Plan Ahead for Next Week’s Meals (And Save Significant Money): A Step-By-Step Guide appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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.

The post Winning the Battle Against Low Quality Generics While Still Saving Money appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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.

The post Amazon Grocery: When Is It More Cost-Effective Than the Local Supermarket? appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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.

The post Investing in Yourself: Diet appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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.

The post The One Month Coupon Strategy: A Really Clever Way to Make Coupons Worthwhile appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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.

The post Getting Over The “Taboo” Of Generics And Store Brands appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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.

The post Healthy, Cheap, Tasty, and Quick: The Grocery Store Grand Slam and Eight Tips on How To Achieve It appeared first on The Simple Dollar.