Look how much I saved on groceries!

Posted by Matt

I sometimes give my wife a hard time about how often she goes shopping, but hopefully she knows I'm kidding. The good news is that it's almost ALWAYS grocery shopping and she turns everything she buys into delicious and healthy food for our family. Even better, she's a die-hard frugalizer. Most grocery stores these days will show you how much you've saved at the bottom of your receipt and her receipts usually show 30 or even 40+% savings. (I hear the title of this post probably once a week.)

That always amazes me. I considered myself a pretty frugal shopper when I was single, but I didn't eat nearly as well as I do now. I usually just compared prices on the shelves of whichever store was within walking distance, but refused to clip coupons. I never thought saving 25 cents at a time was going to add up to much.

So, how does she do it? It takes a lot less effort than I would have imagined.

1. She checks through the big stack of grocery store coupons and advertisements that our local newspaper publishes every Tuesday.
2. She is willing to go to multiple stores if they each have several good deals.
3. She shops at bargain places like Winco and Costco.
4. She sticks to the list.
5. She belongs to every store's membership program for extra savings.
6. She knows the regular prices of all the things we routinely buy and stocks up whenever the price drops substantially. She even found a "buy 2, get 3 free deal" once; that's 60% off!

I was worried about the cost of subscribing to the newspaper at first, but the cost is usually more than paid for by the savings of one trip to the store. Also, I'm personally not crazy about driving to more than one store to shop, but it works for her. So mostly, I think the techniques boil down to just giving a little extra thought and effort to the process.

I recently have been seeing a lot of discussions about the Grocery Game, although we haven't tried it yet. With the kind of savings my wife racks up, I didn't think we needed to, but I just checked the site and saw a picture of a receipt with 97% savings. I hope she's reading this......