Grocery Savings

There are lots of ways to save money on your monthly grocery bill. Some people do coupons (even to the extreme). I tried doing that for a while. I did most of my shopping at Fry's Food, which is the local Kroger brand grocery store. At the time they were accepting competitor coupons which made some things really cheap because I could use multiple coupons on one item. It got a little crazy cutting so many coupons and trying to keep them all straight. And when Fry's stopped accepting competitor coupons, I decided I didn't want to put the time into coupons that was needed in order to get a big savings.

So, I have a new method now, which takes only about 20 minutes a week and saves me quite a bit of money. My co-frugal wife, Denise Meyer, and I go grocery shopping together on Mondays and we make two stops.

The first stop is at American Discount Foods. It's a local, Christian owned, store that sells that stuff that other grocery stores don't want anymore. Some of it is slightly damaged or about to expire. Some of it is already expired foods, but they are usually either canned foods or frozen foods that won't really go bad until the end of time. I don't buy everything there, but I see what they have and try to buy for the future. Like if they have a great deal on frozen brats, I'll buy them knowing I can plan them into next weeks meal line up. Denise and I like shopping there a lot and we enjoy supporting that store.

Our second stop is Walmart. Why Walmart? Because they ad match. So, I spend about 20 minutes looking through the weeks ads from the local grocery stores and write down the things that I want to buy. They I simply take that list with me to Walmart, and when I get to the register I just tell the cashier what I have ad matches for. If they want to confirm that price they have to have the ad and check it themselves. I love it! I get all the different deals from every grocery store at one place!

On average I spend about $40 a week on groceries for 2.5 people (we have a roommate that sometimes eats at home). It's no extreme couponing, but it works!