If your financial adviser told you to buy stocks high and sell low, you probably wouldn’t hire him or her. It doesn’t make much sense to buy your food at their highest price either.
You essentially can make 50-70 percent on your money without paying income tax on the savings or taking any large risk.
Many people are living from paycheck to paycheck. It’s hard when at minimum wage with no benefits you can’t rent a two bedroom apartment in any state in the union. But, you can with a little effort always have food in the house, studies have shown that not having food in the house reduces your life expectancy. The stress always me is not good for your health.
Making healthy choices in your food purchases , simplified food lists, efficiently scratch cooking that allows for less preservatives and fat control will allow you to eat better for less.
Paying 2.79 for a .79 cake mix is just plain stupid. Anticipate how many cake mixes you will use in a six month period and buy as many as you will need. We don’t eat cake everyday, Birthdays and special occasions are easy to predict. The same goes for about any other staple item you may have in your kitchen. I know that I use two to four cans of diced tomatoes a week. It’s not hard for me to predict that in six months I will need 48 cans of diced tomatoes, or two cases. When I can find diced tomatoes in case lot for .49 instead of the dollar they cost, I can afford two cases instead of one. Some things like frozen veggies are pretty much a staple, stable priced item, and don’t need to be stocked. We know that the price would be a dollar a pound. Buy enough to last you until you can find them for a dollar or less. Sometimes , Costco business has five pound bags cheaper that would work for a large family.
Buying bulk meat when it is at a rock bottom price and buying it on a rotation basis over 4-6 weeks saves a lot of time and money. Portion control, butcher it of you need to and precook and de fat ground meat. It is healthier and makes dinner on a flash possible when you need it to. Spaghetti in the insta pot takes 8 minutes. You can make a salad while the pressure is coming up and you need to manually release. Tacos are a 15 minute or less dinner.
Baking and holiday meal supplies go on sale once a year at thanksgiving and Christmas time, Less of them go on sale at Easter. You can plan ahead and save a bit to stock. I have seen cream based soup for 1.58 a can. It as .49 and their were coupons I used prematurely, or I could have had an additional .08 off our .49 price. That dollar times the 20 cans I purchased for the year saved twenty dollars. It is enough to snowball the savings into ten or more pounds of pork loin that saves 1.50 a pound off center cut pork chops that saves.....the snowball effect.
Stick to basic food. We never , or almost never had potato chips in our house growing up. If we did it was part of a treat dinner, We didn’t miss them. These days , if you buy 10 bags of chips, the kids will eat 10 bags of chips. If they aren’t there and there are carrot and celery sticks and peanut butter or hummus, they will be more inclined to eat a healthier snack.
Meal plans help to reduce the cost of groceries and meals. They make life easier and take a matter of minutes. Use time wisely, I wrote notes for this blog in the doctors office while I was waiting. You could jot down 7 meals in a hurry waiting for the kids to get out of school or while having your morning coffee break. Just take a quick inventory of what you have in the fridge to use up. Having a stock of basic food means that you don’t have a huge grocery list and time in the grocery stores is limited.
Never, I say never , go to just one store if at all possible, two grocery stores give you the option of two sets of produce in case some doesn’t look as good or is too high a price. It also gives you the best of prices. You can bet, if one store has a special on hot dogs or hamburgers, then The buns to go with is not going to be on sale. If you have stocked the grocery essentials like canned goods or the few packaged things you still buy, you can shop the perimeter of he store and get in and out fast. Pick the two stores that have the best prices. Here that would probably be Fred Meyers (Kroger store) and Winco, a discount store that is employee owned. Grocery outlet came in first, but their stock is limited. I personally don’t buy produce or meat there. I had a bad experience with apples and they wouldn’t make it good and the meat is all prepackaged. The deli department, however is wonderful. The place to get specialty cheeses . I digress.
Plan your trips of stores are not close together. Piggy back it on to a trip to the doctor or on the. Way home from whatever. We used to go to Winco when it was ten mikes away...once every four to six weeks. Costco is in a need toilet paper basis. They still carry toilet paper. But have discontinued many staples or run out for the replacement hemp or seaweed. They do not carry regular eggs.
I have buy prices in my head. I used to keep a small notebook in my purse. If something is,not my buy price, unless it is a dire necessity and I haven’t stocked it, I don’t buy it. You can usually substitute something else. It is the key to eating well on a low budget.
We eat on less than four dollars a day. We have a stock of food. Somethings less, somethings more.
You can’t say you eat on four dollars a day and spend 8.00 a day buying the ingredients. That’s why Tahini crusted eggplant for dinner doesn’t work. Besides the fact that most of us wouldn’t eat it. Lol 😝.
Basically, when cheese is running six dollars a pound, and you see it on a limited sale for two dollars a pound , you buy, as much as you can safely use or as much as they will let you buy (limits). You just spend your cheese money in something different on sale the next week. They key to not hoarding is knowing what your family eats on a regular basis and limiting the supply to a four to six weeks supply unless it is something that only goes on sale once or twice a year.
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