When thinking of your family's monthly budget, what two areas do you spend the most money on each month?
If you are like every other American, you have probably answered Housing and Groceries. Working on either of those two areas you will effect your overall monthly budget more quickly than any other in your budget plan. Our focus will be on what we spend at the store.
1. Before going crazy in putting together shopping lists, diving into the Internet for websites and coupons, you need to determine whether you are going to use the time-saving "no-clip strategy" or if you are going to strategize using a Coupon Binder.
2. Once you have determined which strategy you are going to use, the next step is to understand where you are spending the most of your money. Go through your house, pantry, medicine cabinet, and household supplies and come up with a list of the top 10-15 items that you spend the most money on and write them down on a list. (Once you get your most expensive items shopped, then you might want to work on the other items around the house.)
3. Track the prices of each of those items each week for the next 6-8 weeks at every store you do your weekly shopping at. This doesn't have to be an elaborate chart. You can use a simple tablet, writing down each item on a separate page along with the names of each store. (Products that you will find your grocery store's "lowest sales price" will typically cycle around again within 6-8 weeks. Your goal is to determine what the "lowest sales price" is.)
4. If you are like me, you will want to take advantage of every opportunity out there in order to receive free coupons and samples. The next thing you will want to do is create a separate Email address (so your family and friend's email won't get lost in the shuffle). You can get a free email address via websites like Google.com or Yahoo.com.
5. Get the newspaper! - 75% of all of the coupons you are going to find circulating in the market, will be found mainly in one place. The Sunday Newspaper. My local newpaper, The Tennessean, has a special promotional deal for new subscribers. www.tennessean.com/superdeal
Receive a FULL year's subscription for apx. $1.00 per week (Avg price $1.75). If placing your order by phone, make sure you mention the "promo code: S-HU" in order have a seamless transaction. Because I promote saving more by getting more than one paper, you can call the custoemr service dept. and request that you would like to have more than one paper delivered each week. (I did!)If you choose not to get the paper delivered, several grocery stores in my area will discount the Sunday newspaper selling it for around a dollar on Monday as well. I did that for a little over a year. There were times, I ran the risk of not finding a paper and had to drive to get one. Considering that the delivered paper is a $1.00 and you are guarranteed getting your's, I find this a REALLY good deal. The cool thing is you don't have to waste gasoline driving around to pick one up....and it's sitting in your driveway before heading off to church!
