Learn how to stretch your weekly food budget while enjoying healthy, tasty foods.
Learn how to stretch your weekly food budget by learning to navigate grocery stores in a whole new way. Retailers spend millions of dollars figuring out how to manipulate shoppers. The investments work. Unless you prepare ahead of time, you’ll wind up wasting your grocery budget on food that’s neither tasty nor filling.
Make your grocery money go further by following these three simple tips:
1. Create a weekly meal plan and shopping list.
If you stop by the store on the way home from work every night, you’ll eventually make a pit stop at a fast food place. Worse, you’ll arrive intending to wing it, and take a bunch of random foods home. Making a weekly meal plan is a bit of a hassle, but it serves an important purpose. The first one you make may be incredibly simple, and depending on your cooking abilities, it may consist of the same recipe noted over and over. That’s okay. The important part is writing it down.
Once you write your meal plan, it’s much easier to make a list of ingredients to buy at the store. You might realize at this point that your meal plan is too expensive and substitute cheaper alternatives. For instance, if every night you’ve written down “steak and potatoes,” you’ll save quite a bit by replacing even one day with spaghetti.
An easy way to save money at this stage is to check your local grocery store specials and build your weekly meal plan around those ingredients. Just make sure you get to the store early. Meat deals, especially, have been known to sell out in record time.
2. Save when you start your shopping at the back of the store.
You’d expect grocery stores all over the country to have unique layouts. No two owners can possibly have the same plans, right? Wrong. Nearly every single grocery in the country has fruits and vegetables up front, milk and eggs in the back and processed junk on the shelves in between. Do you know why they do that?
You’d expect grocery stores all over the country to have unique layouts. No two owners can possibly have the same plans, right? Wrong. Nearly every single grocery in the country has fruits and vegetables up front, milk and eggs in the back and processed junk on the shelves in between. Do you know why they do that?
Milk and eggs are found in the back of the store because they are items almost every shopper needs. To get to them, you have to walk past all the rows of foods you would otherwise ignore. Likewise, if you work your way to the back, you pick up your milk and eggs after you’ve finished doing the rest of your shopping and are feeling tired. You have to pass by an entire store’s worth of convenient foods before you finally buy your ingredients. It gives the store plenty of opportunities to convince you to buy a boxed meal instead.
Going to the back of the store as soon as you arrive helps you stay focused once you’ve picked up your essentials. For most grocery stores, we recommend going straight from dairy to meats to grains to fruits and vegetables to avoid most of the temptation.
3. Take a written grocery list and mark off items as you buy them.
When you make your ingredient list at home, it helps to go back through that list and sort items into groups depending on where they are in the store. Sorting this way prevents you from zig-zagging across aisles, wearing you down and making a bad purchase more likely.
Make sure you mark off each item on your list to be sure you don’t miss anything. Having all of your ingredients on hand will make cooking at home easier than going shopping, even if that means hopping in the car and waiting in line. If an item is not on your list, don’t buy it. If you want more room in your budget for snacks, either write them down by name or specify a budget, so you don’t go overboard.
It can take time and practice to learn how to stretch your food budget. If you need a bit of wiggle room, a title pawn can help. Call or visit the Douglassville Title Tree store to find out whether you qualify today.