A common notion with grocery shopping is that it is shopping for necessities; more often than not, most people come out of a grocery store with a long bill.
Overspending with your everyday groceries can lead to your unbalanced monthly budget. In addition, these short-term costs can take a toll on your financial planning and credit books.
You can save a lot of money with some essential tips while shopping for your groceries.
Prepare Sticky Notes
Jot down the items, make lists and stick to them. Simple enough, no?
Start your budgetary reconciliation with some basics first. It will help you create a daily spending budget, and when you check out, it can help you compare the actual results. That is how budgets work; by comparing the plans and actuals, you get the difference in your variance. Keep your variance positive, and you will stay on track with grocery shopping.
Try out online grocery shopping
It is tempting to buy fresh products and look for the best items available on the racks yourself. Online grocery stores are relatively newer concepts. Chances are they will be offering some reasonable discounted prices. You can pick the items you find in your range and needs.
Another popular option is to buy online and pick it up at the store; this will still help you to stick within your budget.
Use cash more often than credit card
Grocery bills are not pricey payments that you cannot pay in cash. However, if you keep adding it to your credit card bill, chances are you will likely be repaying it with more interest.
Checkout with cash instead of credit card, and if you do pay by credit card, try to settle that amount within the grace days from the bank.
Avoid ‘ready to cook, ready to eat‘ food
A large chunk of our grocery shopping is food-related. Everyone these days is time constrained and looking for a ready-to-go type of solution. These solutions, though, often come pricier.
Counting it by the numbers, avoiding ready-to-cook products may add only a few cents to you, but buying it builds up a habit. So multiply those few cents by the number of items you purchased over a month, quarter, or even an entire year, and you will surely get the final number in dollars that might quickly be closing in on a few hundred, if not thousands.
Grow greens in your backyard
Kitchen gardening is not a new concept, yet worth reminding. It provides you with some fresh green leaves and veggies and saves you money.
If you are into the kitchen gardening habit, you will know you can save on your fertilizers and seeds with it.
Choose bulk buys carefully
You will see offers and discounts everywhere when you enter a grocery shop. Remember, these promotions exist to increase store sales first rather than offering you savings. As a result, stores often bundle up items that do not sell well otherwise. In addition, some things perish quickly, so stores lure customers with bulk offers to buy more.
Check out the bundled items’ expiry dates to ensure you can utilize them well within the valid dates. Also, check carefully what you need with the bundled item or buy one get one free.
Check different stores or brands for pricing comparison
You would probably think all grocery items would be priced similarly at any grocery store. But unfortunately, that is entirely untrue; there is a marginal difference in prices for well-known branded items at any store. So exploring other stores nearby is worth an experiment.
On a side note, have you ever noticed how many items in your shopping basket are relatively newer brands? So, these local brands would naturally offer different prices at their conveyance. Also, some grocery items would cost you differently in other stores. So, do not hesitate to spice up your grocery shopping by hunting for newer brands. It can open up your choices and save you some valuable money with your routine grocery shopping.
Note the seasonal offers
For example, off-season veggies and fruits would be pricier than the seasonal ones. So do carefully note these differences when you’re buying seasonal products.
Similarly, you may also notice some price lag in local vs. imported items. Again, be a patriot there; go for your local products unless purchasing the imported items is inevitable.
Buying better and buying within the plan is habitual. Once you start thinking it is essential, you can save a lot. But unfortunately, people not only spend more on grocery shopping without considering it needs management like any other area but also end up throwing waste sometimes when they fall for bulk-buying promotions they do not need.
Make sure to also check out: Quickest ways to save money on electricity
