My Top 10 Grocery Budget Tips

I’ve been trying to assemble my tips and tricks to making a grocery budget work.  This seems to be an ever-increasing challenge as prices seem to be growing.

However, making a budget work doesn’t require that you stock up on cheap $1 pizzas and Ramen noodles.  I’d say that most of the time when our family goes cheaper, it’s the healthier option anyway.

I’m not much of a coupon queen.  It’s not that I don’t have the time to cut/print them because if I really wanted to, I probably would make time.  The 2 main reasons that I don’t are: I can’t keep them organize or remember I have them at the store no matter what kind of system I try, and second: most coupons are for name brand, processed foods.  I find that buying generic or making it myself is the same or cheaper than using a coupon.

There are some rare instances where coupons come on what I buy and the checker scans it for me.  Sometimes there’s a coupon for real food like potatoes or eggs, and I’ll take advantage of that if I can overcome the “I forget I have them when I get to the store” challenge.  Why do I forget?  I’ll give you 4 squirmy reasons and a wall of candy conveniently placed at check-out as my reason.

I do find that when I shop at my local mom and pop grocery store, they’ll often say “There was a coupon for this in the paper.  Here, I have an extra.”  While I do shop for groceries at Walmart sometimes as well, I certainly don’t get that “I have an extra coupon” service there, and I’ll say without a doubt that I prefer the fruits and vegis at the mom and pop place over Walmart’s produce.  There’s just no comparison.

So besides coupons, here’s what I attempt to do (although these rules are often broken, which often breaks the budget as well.):

One:
Eat all the leftovers.  Uneaten leftovers aren’t just wasted food.  They’re wasted money.  I have a few recipes that use up bits and scraps.  This time of year almost any leftover can be thrown into a basic homemade soup.  I often use leftovers fried up with rice and soy sauce on a skillet.  We call that fried rice.  Ingredients: a meat (eggs count) a vegi, rice, soy sauce, and olive oil as needed.  If I have any of those ingredients as leftovers, this is a quick meal.  Knut often gets packed leftovers for lunch.  It’s really the best way to clean the fridge.

If you are getting sick of some leftover, package it up for the freezer and pull it out when you need a quick meal.  I often will make a triple batch of something and freeze all the leftovers so they don’t even make it to the fridge.  That way you can pull them out in 2 weeks or a month when you haven’t eaten that meal in awhile and all you have to do it warm it up.

Two:
Meal plan.  When I’m really on top of this, I’ll even plan in the snacks.  If you need cheap, healthy, snack ideas, I consistently go to the Healthy Snacks on the Go ebook.  It’s a great resource combining organization, frugality, and healthy recipes. Granola is our new favorite, but that’s for another post.  As ski season is approaching, I’m going to try her recipe in there for homemade power bars ad Knut goes through those a lot while training. 

I’m finding that for me, the snacks made in here are about the 1/3 cost on average to buying them at the store.  Grocery budgets are ruined when we get a pizza because I have no clue what to make, or we’re in town during snack time and the kids need something now and I didn’t plan for it.  When I see an overview for the week, I can alternate more expensive meals with cheaper ones so that we don’t feel too deprived or anything.  It helps to not make heavy meals back to back.

Three:
Make a grocery list and stick to it.  This goes along with meal planning.  Sometimes I’ll make a list with the sales ad in front of me, and other times I don’t.  The main thing is to stick to the list in the store.  Never ever shop from the end of a row where the price is big and bold.  Making the font bigger does not make it cheaper.  Sometimes if I want that item, I’ll go to that aisle, and see that the “end cap” brand was the most expensive version of whatever that item was.  Stick to the list like a grocery shopping Nazi following orders.  There are only 3 things that I’ll vary from the list for if they’re on a good sale: meat, butter, and cheese.  Shredded cheese can be frozen well, so that makes all 3 of those items easy for me to stock up on, and we use all 3 of them all the time.  Around holiday time I’ll break the rules for chocolate chips as well because we go through bags of those like nothing else at Christmas baking time.

Four:
Make your own bread.  I promise, it’s not as hard as you think.  It tastes way better, it’s healthier, and it’s a fraction of the price.  If you have the time, there is no downside here.  I’ve used a breadmaker for about the last 3 years (it paid for itself in about 2 months but probably less), and have not used it since I got the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day book.  It literally is 5 minutes a day, and I’m doing less dishes than when I used my breadmaker.  I think the bread tastes better than my breadmaker as well, and the waiting from setting it out to rise to eating it is less than the breadmaker.  So I can throw it in “last minute” a little easier.

They do say you should use a cooking stone, but I’ve been using a cookie sheet and it’s turned out just fine.  I just got a stone last week, but I just wanted to say for the record that you don’t have to have all the tools they suggest on hand in order to make that kind of bread.

I’ve been making 2 different types of bread a week and storing the dough in my fridge.  This type of breadmaking does not require kneading…it’s that fast.  So Saturday I make the 2 doughs so we have variety during the week.  (This week it’s regular white and oatmeal pumpkin sandwich bread.)  The kids help me stir  the dough right in big Rubbermaid fridge containers and love it.  About 2-3 hours before I need the bread, I take it out of the fridge, rip off a portion of dough for the day, shape it quick with flour and let it rise a few minutes (depending on the recipe) until it goes in the oven.

So far we haven’t had a loaf make it to day 2, so I can’t tell you how it keeps.  I can tell you it’s super yummy, and it’s pennies and minutes to make.

Five:
Make your own yogurt.  This idea came from Katie at Kitchen Stewardship as well.  The lady is a genius.  It’s so stinkin’ easy.  Yogurt makes a healthy snack, breakfast, or frozen dessert.  I try to make this only once a week, and it can be done after the kids go to bed.  I normally make it when I’m watching a movie at night.  I do one step before the movie, and another step after the movie, and then I put it in the cooler/incubator for the night and in the morning it goes in the fridge to cool.  Again, this is not a lot of time or money.  It’s not a little bit cheaper than store-bought.  It’s a small fraction of the price than store-bought.  We eat it with honey, frozen fruit, homemade granola, and I use it for baking a lot as well.  I sub it in any recipe that calls for buttermilk.

Six:
Make your own stocks.  This feeds into the whole “use all your leftovers” rule as well.  This is something that I throw together in the morning, let cool in the afternoon, and divide up in the evening.  That being said, it’s not an all day job.  More like a “fix it and forget it for a few hours” job. 

For clarification, a broth is meat bones boiled dark.  A stock is meat bones, as well as vegis and whatever else you fine boiled until dark.  Many broths/stocks that are store bought have a very high salt content.  That is because they are being smart businesses and using the cheapest ingredients.  I prefer flavor to saltiness, so I make my own and it is cheaper than the salty stuff at the store.

Here’s how you do it:
-get some bones.  For beef broth I get beef bones at the store, and often throw in a beef liver because they’re cheap and full of nutrients too.  I don’t like the texture of liver so don’t eat it, but it’s great in beef stock.  For chicken stock add chicken bones.  If you have access, add the guts and neck or anything else you can find cheap that is chicken related at the store.  After Thanksgiving, I always make a turkey broth from the turkey carcass and use that in recipes that call for chicken broth.  I do this so I don’t have to feel bad about not cleaning the meat off the bones very well off the turkey because that gets tedious at some point.

-Next add some vegis.  Use whatever you have on hand and don’t feel you need to go to the store if you’re missing something.  I use unions, garlic, carrots, celery if I have it.  Your vegis should be clean and roughly chopped, but there is no reason to peel, slice, dice, or leave out the papery outsides.  Shove it all in.  We’ll suck the life out of it.  Avoid creamy vegis like potatoes or corn. 

-Next throw in some spices.  I find that chunky salts like sea salt or kosher salt work well in stocks because they gradually work their way into the stock and don’t just sit on top.  The same goes for peppercorns instead of ground pepper.   I like to add a sprig of thyme and/or parsley.  I find a bay leave or 3 are good in the beef stocks.  Just don’t add a spice that you wouldn’t want in every single recipe you’ll use this stock for.  Keep it generic because you can always add spice when making the actual meal.

-Lastly cover everything in the pot with water until it’s very full and boil for hours until it’s the color you want it to be.  Let it cool, strain, and put in freezer bags or whatever containers you use for the freezer.  I like to freeze in 1 or 2 cup portions and I always label!  As our family is getting older I find myself reaching for the 2 cup bags more often, so that’s what I’m doing now.  Freeze flat in the freezer and stack them up for when you need them.  This practice is not “a bit cheaper” than store bought, it’s pennies on the dollar to store bought.  Not only that, but you will immediately taste the difference.  Knut can taste when I’ve cheated and bought broth at the store with the first bite. 

What do you use stocks for?  Gravy, soups, stir fries, sometimes casseroles or making a seasoned rice.  I also like to make some biscuits and then use this to make some sauce and add some cooked ground beef to the sauce, pour it on top of the biscuits and it’s a really quick meal. 

Seven:
Make noodles.  Homemade noodles is a new project of mine.  I will blog about this more later and come back to this post and add a link telling how it’s going.

Eight:
Make crackers.  We’ve switched from buying graham crackers and wheat thins to making them at home.  They take almost no time.  Buying a box of either one of these is about $2.50.  Making the same amount is about $1.  Seriously, like many of the other things listed above, you will slap your forehead and think to yourself  “I’ve been paying someone to make this for me?!?”

What I love about making crackers is that it isn’t as hard to roll out or manage as cookie dough or even bread dough.  It doesn’t require the mess of lots of flour like some other rolling foods.  This means that the kids can help with this one and my kitchen recovers that much faster! 

Nine:
Always look at the “price per oz” on the tag at the store, not the total price.  You’ll be surprised what things in bulk are actually more expensive, and what brands cost how much.  I never, ever shop by the big price in the bold numbers.  I shop looking at the small price per oz numbers in the upper left hand corner.  It makes an enormous difference.

Ten:
Cut down on cereal consumption.  My kids love cereal.  Love might be an understatement, especially when it comes to the boys.  The reality of it is, cold cereal is about the most expensive breakfast we have in this house, even when we get the generic stuff in the bag.  So a few days a week, we’re swapping cold cereal for one of the hot kinds.  Eggs are cheaper.  Oatmeal is cheaper.  Steel cut oats in the crockpot overnight are cheaper.  Toast is cheaper.  Cream of wheat is cheaper.  Pancakes are cheaper.  Don’t get the instant oatmeals because there’s an insane amount of sugar and it’s not cheaper.  Dish up 1/3 cup of oatmeal, 2/3 cup of water, brown sugar, or whatever cinnamon or the like, some frozen fruit or dried fruit or cut up apples, and stick in the microwave for a minute and a half.  It doesn’t get more instant than that.

We get more full and don’t require as much food for snack later.  Knut has eggs scrambled with spinach, peppers, cheese and tomatoes almost every morning.  If he has anything else for breakfast, he is always hungry before noon.

So that’s it.  Most of things on this list will not require much time, but they do require planning and that’s normally the tough part.   It’s an exercise in organization, but one that is well worth it.

Other ideas for budgeting groceries can be found over at Raising Olives.