Grocery Savings in 15 Minutes Per Week

One of the things I have to constantly evaluate is whether I have more time or money. Between work, school activities and the family, sometimes? Time means a little more than extra coupon savings. However, I’m still not about to pay full price. So, with no time and little money, a girl’s gotta find a few strategies to keep the groceries under budget.

It starts with menu planning, which I actually still need to work on. The biggest key is focusing on the fresh foods in the sale ad each week, rather than planning a menu of my own and finding high prices on the ingredients. It’s a simple matter to find out what meat & vegetables are on sale each week, and plan our family meals.

I also take a quick peak at my favorite sites for printable coupons and print what I need for our other meals—cereal, pasta and other dried goods. It’s a simple way to save on the things we need, even when I don’t have the time to clip coupons every week.

With Red Plum, Smartsource and Cellfire, I can find coupons for a lot of the items we use every week.

And the rest, I stock up on at the warehouse store. I keep a running list of bulk discount bargains and make a trip to Costco about once each month for basics like seasoning, trash bags and lunch supplies for the girls. Not to mention a giant box of microwave popcorn! We’re totally out of popcorn right now—it’s kind of a staple around here.

And so, I’m headed to Costco later today to save a bit of cash—in the spare time I have between carpool, Girl Scouts and doctor’s appointments this week!