The Nine Steps to Super Grocery Store Savings

What you are about to do to achieve your real-life grocery savings will be unlike any plan you have ever taken on. I am going to give you nine critical pieces – I call them “steps” to altering your thinking, inside and out, in a way that will make, attain, and keep lasting grocery store savings. 

Yes, you may have to spend more time on some steps than on others, but only by fully mastering all eleven steps will you be able to do this right, this time, beginning now.

Step #1: The Correct Attitude

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To overcome your grocery store savings challenges, first you have to know exactly where you are starting. It is to understand yourself. What is it about yourself and your grocery store savings problems that you’ve come to believe? This understanding, which relates to your savings, and indeed to your entire life, is vitally important. If you believe it and if it’s real to you, then it’s for your reality that you live every day.

If you believe with conviction that you will fail and never, ever, be able to manage your kitchen budget, then failure is what understanding yourself dictates. It shows up as a heavy load of disgust, shame, guilt, hurt, self-hatred, and other self-critical voices that do nothing but drag you down.

Step # 2 Mastery Over the Kitchen Inventory

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One of the most important grocery savings confidence builders is knowing what is in the pantry, freezer, spice rack and other places you keep cooking ingredients before we make out our shopping list. You have a couple of questions you begin to ask yourself before beginning our plan.

The inventory gives you direction and defines discipline. Knowing your plan and keeping it prominent is your mind gives you direction to your shopping plan. I define discipline and commitment as putting your shopping plan first. You do what your plan “says” you should do rather than what you feel like doing. Committed shoppers are driven by their purpose and not by how they happen to feel on a given day.

Step # 3: Developing Your Menu Plan

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A menu is a list of dishes we plan to serve. To our family, it is a list of dishes from which they’ll eat during the week. To the cook, it is a list of dishes we plan to prepare. It is also a management tool for our household. It is fair to say that it is the simple most important household document. Purchasing, cooking and food costs are all based on the menu.

We must plan the menus for the people eating the food. This sounds like a simple rule, but we frequently forgotten it. We must never forget that the family is the main reason we are cooking.

A course is a food or group of foods served at one time or we intend to eat at the same time. Most of the time, we put the courses on the table at once – appetizer, salad, main dish and side dishes, and desserts, for example – but will eat them in a particular order.

When planning our menu, we must have a basic understanding of nutrition. Because our bodies need varieties of foods in order to function and to be healthy. We want to proved a nutritious food and well-balanced menus.

Step # 4: High Yield Weekly Planner

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The first step is to think about the week ahead. It does not matter which day you consider the beginning of the week, I happen to use Monday. Use the day you do your main weekly grocery shopping as a starting point. I happen to like to shop early Sunday morning when there are few people at the grocery store.

Fill in your family's planned weekly activities. Have fun and be creative. Use your own shorthand, color-coding or symbols. Makes it easy for you to picture how the week will be filled.

Step # 5: Supportive Price Book Management

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You have probably heard about a Price Book, or read about them in budgeting articles. However, what is a Price Book? It is your powerful tool used by smart shoppers to help you save money. It is a practical technique used to record prices of frequently purchased items.

Armed with your current Price Book, you will know if an advertised “special” is truly a bargain or not. You can avoid costly mistakes. You can save money by knowing how much to pay for items used most often.

Step # 6 The Recipe Grocery Savings Keystone

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This section’s goals like kitchen budget and making meals is that to besides saving money you are also able to eat healthier. The menu is the keystone to any grocery shopping savings program. However, the heart of any menu is the recipe. The recipe is an important tool for the cook. It’s the means of recording and passing along vital information. Learning to cook without being able to check with a recipe would be like learning to play the piano without using written music.

In cooking, thorough measurement is a key part. It is important for constant quality each time you make a recipe. Moreover, it is important for cost control.

Converting recipes is a very important technique. Nearly everyone can double a recipe or cut it in half.

Portion Control is the measurement of portions to ensure that you serve the correct amount of an item. The home cook must be aware of proper portion sizes. The recipe usually tells us what the portion sizes are.

Step # 7: Superior Coupon Planning

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COUPONS! $1.25 for a newspaper on Sunday can turn into major savings in coupons. Get to know your local grocery retailers. Many offer double or triple coupons on certain days. This can add up to double-digit savings on your grocery bill. (Personally, coupons usually account for a 15-20% savings for me!)

READ THE ADS ! Sunday grocery ads are filled with great weekly sales, especially on meats and produce.

Step # 8: Master Organized Grocery List

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Number #1 reason, it saves you time. With a master grocery list, you will not have to do the same work all over again every time you go to the grocery store. You do most of the work just once. Beside, it only takes a few minutes every week for you to mark off what you need on my master list. It will also help prevent your forgetting things. A master list is also (slightly) more likely to be used by the rest of the family to help you stay on top of what's been used up.

Step # 9: No-Fail Grocery Shopping

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Before we get into ways of utilizing coupons to save money, it helps to understand the way that stores sell the products and entices you to spend more than you really want. By taking the time to understand the different ways grocery stores encourage you to spend money, you can combat their strategies and spend money only on the merchandise you really need.

Most people view a grocery store as simply a place to purchase food and other household necessities. In reality, grocery stores are built to get you to buy more than you really need. It's essential that you recognize their sales tactics so that when you walk into a grocery store, you walk out with what your need instead of what the grocery store wants to sell you.

Bonus Step: A Can't Fail Belief in Canning

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One of the ways American’s can save on their grocery bill is either canning fruits and vegetables in season. I know when I was growing up, my grandparents basement pantry was filled with canned fruits and vegetables. For example, it takes 2-1/2 to 3-1/2 pounds of tomatoes to make a quart of whole, halved, or quartered canned tomatoes. Tomatoes, along with a small amount of lemon juice, are the only ingredients. 1 quart equals about 2.2 (14.5 oz. $.80/can) cans of tomatoes. That is $1.76 of canned tomatoes.

The basic cost of fresh in season can be about $.25 per pound or $0.625 to $0.875 for a quart of home canned tomatoes. That is a savings of $1.135 to $.885. You are making your tomatoes at about $0.284 to $0.398 for 14.5 oz. If you get a 2 for $1 deal, you still save $0.216 to $0.102 per 14.5 oz.

Why the Nine Steps Work When other Programs have failed

These nine steps are action-oriented plans to follow. It helps you focus on defining and diagnosing where your behavior is now. It helps you with tools and the ability to stay accountable and action-oriented in making the important changes required. No one is saying it will be easy. However, the steps give you the foundation:

You Don’t Need Self-Control

Admit it! Every time you ever started anything, even a new diet, you tried to overpower it with self-control or willpower. It is normal. However, it will not work. It is a temporary feeling and is destined to doom. The twelve steps to grocery store savings do not depend on self-control or willpower for success.

Plan For Success

You plan your life by setting your time that you spend in the grocery store. You plan your life by the time it takes to make your meals. When you do these things, you set up a positive and powerful control in your life that totally and instinctively both orders immediate results and nourishes them for the long term. You say good-bye to your old self and begin to move toward a healthy and wealthy you. With it, it is easier to stay the course.

With planning, you aim your life so that it pulls for you when you’re weak, when you’re not pumped up, when you don’t feel like behaving prudently, when you don’t want to tell yourself “no.” Make a decision right now whether you will use the twelve steps to grocery store savings. It could be the single most important decision you make to make the most of the quality of your life and change the course of your life.

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