Frugal Living 101

Those who know me have many different labels for my spending habits. Some think I’m a “penny pincher,” some think I’m extremely thrifty, and some think I’m just plain cheap. I call myself a frugal genius. Arriving at this self-proclaimed status has been a journey of about ten years of money management mistakes and successes, and I now consider scrimping and saving as a part time job which pays me as much or as little as I put into it.

Until about a year ago, when my husband took a position that was a considerable decrease in pay for our family, I don’t know that I was really as interested in “frugal living.” I worked full time as a journalist, had a busy lifestyle and didn’t really feel that I had the time to clip coupons, find all the great sales in town or constantly be watching our budget.

Needless to say, that all changed, out of pure necessity.

We needed to cut our budget big time, yet we already didn’t have a whole lot of the extras that we could cut. So I went to the place that I knew I could cut the most out of: my grocery bill. I did a ton of reading, mainly thanks to my local library, including the first frugal living book I ever read, Frugal Living For Dummies and I realized that while I was spending on average about $400 a month on groceries for a family of three, there were people out there feeding small families for about $60 a week. I was determined that we would be one of those families.

Just by learning some very basic techniques, which I call  “frugal living 101,” I was able to cut our grocery budget by almost half.  This article is the first in a series I call ”Frugal Living 101.”

And today’s lesson? Today’s lesson is to know the prices in your local area.

In my little town we have three different grocery stores: two locally owned chains and a Super Wal-Mart. And while Super Wal-Mart generally has the better prices on most items, I had never really compared prices at the different stores. I just always bought my groceries at the Super-WalMart. But that all changed when I begn creating a grocery price chart.

You can download a good one from Grocery Pricebook. Now before I go on I must say, this takes a lot of time and work, but it’s worth it.

Start by making a list of all the things that you normally buy, and then make sure to add the things to the list that you only occasionally purchase. You can do this however works best for you, but once I had all the items added to my chart, I photocopied it. Once I had three charts, I assigned each chart to a different store. One week I went to the Miracle Mart and went through the entire store until I had found and had written down the regular price for each item on my list. The next week I went to Mark-It-Foods and the next I went to Super Wal-Mart.

If you have problems with taking your kids to the store, I recommend finding a friend or family member who will watch the kids while you do this, because it is time consuming, especially if you don’t frequent the store enough to know where things are in the aisles. Not to mention, you may feel a little bit ridiculous going through aisle by aisle and scribbling on your chart every two minutes. The first time I did this I had one of the store associates ask me if I needed help finding anything. I said, “No, I’m just writing down all of your prices so I can compare them to the other stores in town.”

I don’t think that was the response he was expecting.

But once you’re equipped with your trusty price sheet, you are ready for “Step Two: Planning Your Grocery Shopping Trip.”

Happy Budgeting,

Kate