With the economy still struggling and your savings account getting slimmer by the week, it’s time to examine your alternatives to cutting costs. Look around you. You’ve been annoyed by the price of gas for years. You’ll drive around to save a few cents a gallon. After filling up your car, you saved what? A dollar by driving a couple blocks to the station where it’s a few pennies less? If you put a little of that determination into your grocery bill, you could save hundred times that a month.
Let’s take a look at how you can reduce your monthly grocery bill and keep a little more of your hard earned money in your pockets.
1. Take a look at the obvious places first: the Sunday paper. If you don’t subscribe, pick up a copy and go straight to that pile of coupon inserts. Grab your scissors and go to town. Just one or two cuts with your scissors and you’ve already saved more money than that gas station bargain shopping. Keep an eye out for local store coupons that allow you to double coupons you find in those inserts. In just a few minutes, you could easily save $10, $15 or $20.
2. Hop online and hit the search engines. If you use a particular product and don’t find a coupon for it in the paper, you might find it online. Search for the brand name or, if you don’t need a particular brand, search for the type of product. Often you might find competing brands that are aggressively battling each other for customers and offering coupons at their sites.
3. There are also other sources of stacks of printable grocery store coupons than the newspaper. Again get on the search engines and look for “printable grocery coupons” or some similar search. After a brief search, you should be able to find a few free sources where you can print coupons in bulk. Once more, just a few minutes of time and effort here can net out another $10 or $20 in grocery savings.
4. Plan your meals and stick to it. This may be a little more time consuming and not a lot of fun when you see that impulse buy at the grocery store that makes your mouth water. When you start buying those extra items, that’s when your budget takes a hit. Those large warehouse stores like Costco or Sam’s Club can save you money when buying in higher quantities, but they can also kill your budget when you grab 5 or 6 more things you weren’t planning to buy.
5. If you have the yard for it, plant your own vegetables. If you’ve got the sprinklers set to go off automatically anyway, maybe there’s a patch of yard you can set aside to use that water to grow your own food. Those vine-ripened tomatoes you want are right there for you without having to pay extra at the store.
With a simple game plan and some good habits, you can trim that monthly food bill considerably. At the end of the month, how much time did you really spend? One or two hours? And if you’re able to save $50 or $100 dollars, wasn’t that time well spent?
Harper G. Samuels loves saving money and writing. To get further information about store coupons or to find articles discussing printable store coupons online, check out the StoreCouponsNow site today.
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