Shave $150 a Week off Your Grocery Food Bill

Here's a piece from Money Magazine about how you can save on your grocery food bill.

Generally, it's a good piece, but it gets started off on a shaky note:

Grocery shopping seems simple enough, but Americans are wasting more money, food and time than ever by not planning. We spend more on food each year (an average of $5,340 these days) than on anything else besides our house and car.

Er, excuse me. Haven't you heard of a little expense called TAXES!

Ok, back to the article. Here's a disturbing fact:

Today households on average toss 14 percent of the food they buy, about double what we threw out 20 years ago.

Yikes! If you simply consume everything you buy, your food bill could drop by as much as 14%. Not bad. I'd take even a 5% savings.

Here are some of their other tips:

• Be picky.
• Use what you have.
• Make lists.
• Shop online.
• Make a game of it.

I live in Western Michigan, so technology is a bit slow to get here. (I'm using Window 95 as we speak -- isn't that the newest version?) Seriously, we don't have online shopping as far as I know, so that option is out. My wife already does option #1 well (she's the queen of picky when it comes to food spending). But the "use what you have" and "make lists" (really "use better lists" for us) might help us out a bit.

My wife has one other MAJOR grocery shopping saving tip: she never lets me shop for groceries. Why?

• I'm in a hurry. Price is a secondary concern.
• I don't know the going and sale prices for various items.
• I tend toward brand names.
• And I don't know half of the new items out there (all of which I HAVE to have -- hey, did you know they now have Pringles with printing on them?) unless someone lets me in a grocery store.

Comments

[aascherer]

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[Art]

I liked your comments, especially the one where you said you didn't know the going sales price. I find myself not knowing either, but the truth is if you don't know, you don't know that some item is way overpriced, or if you're getting a good buy, either.