How To Safe & Cut Your Grocery Costs In Half

What if you could slash your grocery budget by 50% while still buying the same amount of products you used to? If you could spend $50 to get $100 worth of groceries?

That would be pretty amazing and sort of a God-send, wouldn’t it?

By giving yourself a slow but steady head start you can save fifty percent and more on your groceries.

BUY LOSS LEADERS

Every week the supermarkets in your area offer absolute stunt prices. They sell items for half price one way or the other.

Either it’s a straightforward 50% off or it’s buy one, get one free (also advertised as two for the price of one).

START YOUR PANTRY STOCKPILE WITH 50% OFF OFFERS

Your challenge is three-fold:

1. to incorporate as many of these cheap items in this week’s menu as possible

2. to buy as many extra’s as you can afford of those items that are 50% and that you would normally use.

3. to write down the date, product and price

Within weeks you’ll start to notice that instead of buying an item at full price, you grab the 50% off version you have in your pantry stockpile.

REPEAT THE BUYING CYCLE

You’ll also start to see that what seemed to be random offers are in fact waves or cycles of offers. Certain items or brands come on special every X amount of weeks or months.

Because you write down these offers you can see which items are on what cycle.

That helps you figure out how many of a special offer you should buy. If canned vegetables come on special every 8 weeks and you use about 10 cans in an 8 week period, you now know how many you need in your pantry to make it from one offer to the next and never ever have to pay full price again.

WHERE TO FIND LOSS LEADERS

Loss leaders are most prominently advertised on the front page of a store’s flyer. Some appear at the back.

Inner pages of the flyer show items at their regular price, at tiny or fractional saving or at fake special prices (raised one week before to claim a lower price now).

Only buy the loss leader items. Don’t waste your time, energy and money on the other stuff.

Be warned that supermarkets will place specials together so that when you grab the loss leader you look up and think “Oh, maybe I should buy that too!”

Loss leaders are based on this idea; they are funded by all the extra stuff we buy when we pick tem up.

Make a deal with yourself and get only the lossleaders. If this seems not possible, set aside one day or one trip to the supermarket to buy just the loss leaders.

ONE STORE OR MANY?

If you apply the above principle to two or more supermarkets you obviously have more loss leaders, more money in your pocket. More to track too.

Be careful though: don’t let this cost time (or too much extra money to drive around). Ideally these stores are as close by as possible; walking distance would be best.

We generally keep an eye on the flyers of two supermarkets that are close by here. We could easily expand it to 3 or 4 but I’d have to track the prices of that many more stores, walk further. In general I haven’t found it worth it.

So, stick to one supermarket, maybe two.