Cheap Groceries

On Sunday I had to go through five weeks worth of coupon flyers and cut everything out and put them in their envelopes. It took about an hour or so to cut coupons and also sort through to get the ones that I wanted to use with my Grocery Game list.

And let me once again sing the praises of Grocery Game – it’s AWESOME (no, this isn’t a paid post). I can’t tell you how much money I’ve saved since joining in January. Although I could probably calculate it pretty easily since I’ve made a lot of posts about it. I’ll do that in a minute.

But back to my story – I opted to go shopping on Monday night – what a difference from shopping on Sunday afternoons! Sunday afternoons the stores are crowded and half the shelves are empty because of everyone else shopping the same deals. But Monday nights? Stores are empty and only a few items were out of stock. But not the important ones. WOO HOO!!!

I hit Lowes Whole Foods first. Only two of the items I bought were full price – everything else was already on sale. Add on double coupons, and I paid $36.07 but saved $21.00. I bought twenty items. Not bad.

I then headed over to Harris Teeter and this is where I did REALLY well. Once again I bought twenty items. And once again two of the items were full price. However, this time around I spent $28.76 and saved $46.41. That’s fantastic!

So I got $132.24 in groceries for $64.83, effectively saving about 50% once again. That’s my standard average – a savings of 50%.

I can’t tell you enough how great the GroceryGame is at stretching your dollar. By having a great stockpile I’m able to splurge and buy things we don’t “need” but can enjoy (like Pop Tarts for the kids or refrigerated cookie dough for me (I love that stuff)).

Here are my totals (that I’ve tracked here at Cootiehog) since January 2008. This isn’t a true total since I haven’t always come here to post my results – but it’s a close approximation.

Jan 2008 – Aug 2008 Costs paying the ORIGINAL PRICES: $1,703
Jan 2008 – Aug 2008 Costs ACTUALLY PAID: $824
Total percentage of savings: 52%

I’ve basically paid ~$110 per month for groceries that normally would have cost ~$227 per month. I’d say those are significant savings. And according to Grocery Game, MOST people actually save more like 60-67% each week at the grocery store (as I said, because I’m saving so much I tend to splurge on non-essentials like sweet treats)

Now, this doesn’t include all our spending – Denis still goes to Costco (which is probably $100 per trip per month), and he also still pops out to the store when we need a few quick things like milk, seltzer, eggs, etc. But I still think our overall expenses have ABSOLUTELY gone down since I started doing the grocery game in January.

If you’ve never done Grocery Game before, consider doing the $1 trial. For $1, first-time members can try the game for four weeks (and I think you can use lists for up to four stores in that four weeks’ time). After that, it’s is just $10 every eight weeks for one store, but if you live in an area where more than one list is available, you’ll be billed an extra $5 every eight weeks for any additional stores you may get the list for.

I get two lists, so I pay $15 every eight weeks. Considering the amount I save on groceries, that $2+ per week is totally worth it.

If you sign up for the free trial, please put my email address in as the referral source. The email I have associated with Grocery Game is jaynee at yahoo dot com. Trust me – you can’t go wrong!