Take a big bite out of grocery bills

The average U.S. household spends 13% of its budget on food, but savvy supermarket shoppers can save hundreds of dollars a month. Here are secrets from a couple of champs as reported by MSN Money article – Take a big bite out of grocery bills By MP Dunleavey.

Editor’s note: Join columnist MP Dunleavey and a group of women as they seek to strip away the myths around money, liberate themselves from debt and find financial sanity. Follow the ongoing quest of the Women in Red every other Wednesday in Dunleavey’s column on MSN Money.

When I was a kid, my mother would sit in front of the television with a dinner tray in front of her, and she’d methodically go through all the supermarket fliers, clipping coupons and writing her grocery list in her meticulous, fine print.

I thought she was nuts.

Under Paragraph 967P of the Geneva Conventions governing the relations between youngsters and their parents, I found my mother’s behavior strange and embarrassing, and I wanted no part of it. Ever.

Then a few decades passed, and I became a mom myself. Until recently I’ve been willing to make many lifestyle adjustments in the name of financial sanity, but cutting back our grocery bill wasn’t one of them. Spending about $400 a month for two adults and a baby seemed just about right.

Then I started reading the Grocery Challenge thread on the trend-setting, ground-breaking, take-no-prisoners Women in Red message board and learned that a single mother of two had cut her bill from $700 a month to about $260.

Was there sorcery involved? Enron-scale accounting fraud? Was Mom right all along? I had to find out.

You are what you eat

Because food is an essential, it sometimes goes unchallenged as a spending category in many people’s budgets.

You might groan inwardly when you see the total mounting at the grocery checkout counter, but for most hardworking, time-pressed people, it seems easier to cut back in other areas first: clothes shopping, cable services, vacations and other extras. After all, you have to eat.

But people may not realize that food is a substantial financial outlay for most Americans: about 13% of the average household’s annual expenditures, according to a 2005 report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That includes about 7.5% spent on groceries at home and the rest on eating out.

Economists are quick to point out that because of numerous federal subsidies, Americans typically spend a smaller portion of their income on groceries than, say, most Europeans do.

But as I learned from the food mavens on the Grocery Challenge thread, living in the land of cheap grub is not a reason to become complacent. No, no! As these savvy shoppers will tell you: If you think you got a certain item for a great price, rest assured there’s a way to get it even cheaper — or maybe even for free.

The ugly myths of coupon clipping

Do you have to become a wild-eyed coupon clipper to slash your grocery bill, stuffing your car with stacks of supermarket fliers and driving checkout clerks bonkers with your wallet of wadded 50-cent-off vouchers?

Will your diet start to revolve around Hamburger Helper, dented cans of beans and stale coffeecake?

Not at all. In fact, people who choose to be frugal about food aren’t necessarily in financial straits — nor do they sacrifice their quality of life or their quality of meals.

“About a year ago I looked at our $700-a-month grocery bill, and I was horrified,” says Sue McDermed, a mother of two who lives in Southern California. “It was our third-largest bill, and I thought: I can do better than this.”

She challenged herself to cut her family’s food expenditures, she says, as part of a bigger financial rethinking of her own goals and priorities. Yet she doesn’t compromise on quality, usually buying as much by way of organic and natural groceries as she can.

Sharon Lustro, 51, could teach Warren Buffett a thing or two about buying low. She typically spends about $30 a week on groceries, she says, often leaving a store having paid no more than a dollar or two for a cartload of goods.

Lustro, whose household income is about $125,000, also does it more for the principle of the thing and because she prefers to invest her money in traveling and her children’s education.

“I’ve seen so many people go into debt so needlessly,” she says. “I knew one family that earned about $200,000 a year, and they had to declare bankruptcy. It’s your day-to-day habits that get you into trouble — what you eat for lunch, what you buy for dinner.”

Lustro, who works part time, says she spends less than two hours a week organizing and shopping — and her children will graduate from a top-notch college with no student-loan debt.

To clip or not to clip

McDermed and Lustro use different shopping strategies. As someone who used to work in grocery retailing, McDermed knows a handful of insider tips and tricks that help her to spend less. “Coupons don’t play as important a role for me,” she says.

On the other hand, Lustro is a devotee of the CouponMom Web site, a sort of miracle site that tells you which items are discounted at which stores in your geographical area.

Whatever cost-cutting method you use, both of these shopping mavens emphasize the following:

• Like any other diversion, the grocery game should be fun.
• By cutting back on your food expenses, you should not only save money but time.
• With the time and the money you save, your life will become less stressful.
• You will not lose your mind and end up camping out at your local Piggly Wiggly to be the first in line to nab that 2-for-1 grapefruit special.

Here are their secrets:

• Get to know sales cycles. McDermed says stores reduce their products according to a 12-week cycle, give or take. Let’s say your spaghetti sauce is normally $2.19 a jar; on sale it’s $1.99. That’s the phantom sale price, says McDermed, so hang in there while the price drops to two for $3. But don’t buy until it hit the rock-bottom price of, say, 10 for $10 or BOGO — buy one, get one free. That’s when you buy.
• Know your rock-bottom price. McDermed recommends keeping a price notebook for a while so that you get to know the rock-bottom prices for most items. That way you’re less likely to get sucked in by phantom sale prices because you know a steeper discount is around the corner.
• Spot the loss leaders. Those are the staggering deals — Tropicana orange juice for a nickel — that lure unsuspecting customers into stores, who then buy lots of other things they don’t need. “If you see an unbelievable deal, scoop it up!” says McDermed. Just don’t buy anything else.
• Shop off-list. Your mom told you to stick to a list in order to save, but Lustro disagrees. When she saw ground turkey on sale for $1 a package (a loss leader), she happened to have a $1 coupon for the same brand — and got it for nothing. She may not have turkey meatballs for a month, but when she does, it’ll be a free meal.

• It’s OK to pay nothing. Lustro is the queen of ruthless coupon deployment — going for doubles, triples and home runs — but she says it pays to know the rules of each store. Some won’t double the coupon if it exceeds the face value of the item. Asking is the best way to save. If you have a $1 coupon for Suave shampoo, which is $1.99, and it’s double coupon day, yes, you can get it for free.
• Become a coupon collector. You don’t have to depend on fliers (which Lustro organizes by date in a hanging file that she keeps in her car). Often supermarkets place coupons right next to discounted items. Lustro advises keeping the coupons, even if you don’t need the items right then. She asks friends to send her coupons they don’t use.
• Don’t play silly supermarket games. If an item is on sale, six for $3, don’t assume you have to buy all six, says McDermed. You can buy just one for the sale price of 50 cents.
• Stand your financial ground. Many Grocery Challenge shoppers note that hostile checkout people sometimes try to sabotage their savings efforts. The only solution is to talk to a manager — and be willing to wait in line for the checkout people who cheer you on when your bill comes to zero (and many do).

I know. This strategy sounds too simple to deliver big savings, but the gals who are committed to the Grocery Challenge say the results are real. A reader in Texas notes that they don’t get as many great grocery deals as other states, but nonetheless she has been able to cut her grocery budget from a range of $100 to $150 a week for two adults and four kids to less than $80 a week, just by signing up for the weekly paper. “We’ve since made our money back with all the coupon savings,” she says.

Published March 7, 2007

You should also check out the message board Women in Red Hosted by MP Dunleavey.  If you liked this post also check out Bargain Shopping = Free Money

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