Family Budget

Making a healthy grocery shopping list has been the furthest thing from my mind ever since I went to college. For five years I barely had time to commute between school and work and back to school, let alone time to actually plan any healthy meals. Now I’ve been out of school for several years, but I find that I still struggle to break some of those very unhealthy habits I learned back then. One of my problems is that, aside from the obvious things, I don’t always know which foods are healthier than others.

This past week I was doing some reading on the American Heart Association website and I found something I think is really cool. They have a simple grocery shopping list maker on their website that lists foods that are certified to be heart-healthy. If you’re interested in being healthy AND frugal, this is a great grocery list tool.

As I mentioned, it is simple so there aren’t a lot of bells and whistles but you can browse foods by category or by manufacturer. There is also a category called “My Items” where you can add anything that doesn’t already appear on their lists. Personally, I want to eat healthy but often I’m a little too lazy to do the research for finding foods that are good for me. With this tool, they have already done the hard part for you so all you have to do is browse their list and add the number of items you want.

When you’re done making your grocery shopping list you can save it, print it or access it on your mobile device (for the tech-savvy grocery shoppers). The one thing I didn’t like about it was that, once you add something to your list it doesn’t seem like you can edit the quantity. Instead, you have to delete the item and add it again with the correct quantity. While this particular list may not appeal to all areas of health-related diets, it is certainly a step in the right direction. If you’re looking for an easy way to fill your grocery shopping list with healthier food items, give this tool a try!

Well after that last poll asking people about their grocery shopping list habits, I started thinking. What goes hand-in-hand with making a grocery list (well, IMO anyway)? Clipping coupons, of course! So I went back to ask 500 people and I was actually surprised by the results. Of the people that responded, almost 65% of people said that they do NOT use coupons on a regular basis when they grocery shop.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that these polls are nowhere near scientific and the responses include some countries around the world where coupons are not even available. So I focused on the responses just from the US and the numbers are basically the same. Despite the fact that we’re in the middle of a recession worse than this country has seen in years, people are either unwilling or uneducated about how to save money on their groceries.
Continue reading » Are Grocery Coupons a Waste of Time?

I’ve often wondered how many people believe that they can benefit from making a grocery shopping list before they go to the store. Personally, I find lists to be very useful in general and especially when I am grocery shopping. There will almost always be things that you leave off your list and that’s ok. The two biggest advantages to taking a grocery shopping list to the store are that it saves you time and helps you focus.

I guess those really might be the same advantage. If you go to the store without a shopping list, at some point or another you will find yourself moving slowly down an aisle trying to remember what it was that you needed. This wastes time but it can also end up costing you money because as you wander along you are bound to see something on sale that you don’t REALLY need but it’s such a good deal, you’ll go ahead and buy some anyway. Keep in mind that I am talking about a major grocery shopping trip here, not the one-off 10:00PM milk run (make that cookies and milk if you’re anything like me).

Whether you’re a believer in grocery shopping lists or not, I thought you might enjoy the following poll and it’s results Continue reading » Spend less by using a grocery shopping list

Here is a short video about how to create a grocery shopping list. This is a simple but good idea and one that we find very useful in our household. I especially like the fact that her list is right on the fridge, that makes it very handy and quick to add things. Leave a comment here and tell me how you create your grocery shopping list.

As promised, this will be the last of my posts on managing family food money. On top of that, I’ll keep it short and sweet. In my second post I mentioned a “trick” to making our grocery budget appear like it was cut in half. So, here it is.

I receive paychecks bi-weekly, so I get 26 paychecks a year. As most people who are paid this way know, that means there are two months a year, 6 months apart from each other, when you receive three paychecks. If you do your budget by month, as we do, then those “extra” paychecks every 6 months provide an interesting opportunity.

Continue reading » Managing Family Food Money - Part 3

I’ve always wanted to build a tool to help people create a grocery list. Someday I may still do that, but for now I found a really cool tool online that lists tons of grocery prices at local stores in your area. All you have to do is put in your zip code and it automatically pulls up the grocery stores that they have in their database from your area.

That’s not even the best part though! This company has actually compiled and continues to track grocery prices for the past 19 years!! As you look through the list of groceries, they have stars next to each item indicating how good of a sale price each one is.

For grocery list items that are a great deal (based on historical data), they will have five stars next to them. If something is not such a good deal then it will only have one star and so on. So you can see grocery prices from various different stores at once, all categorized together (i.e. household cleaning supplies, meats, dairy, etc.) and it even lets you select how many of each item to add to your grocery list.

Continue reading » Create and Print Your Grocery List Online For FREE

I meant to continue this post on managing family food money a while ago, but we had a lot going on around the 4th of July, so I apologize for taking so long. Continuing where I left off, I was talking about our self-inflicted/self-taught budgeting “education.”

It seemed that we were very slow learners.  Although I don’t really have anything to compare to, I remember the process of learning how to manage our budget was painful. The first lesson that I learned was about communication. First and foremost, there should be some! Imagine trying to climb that mountain while just assuming those around you know what you are thinking and will act accordingly.  No discussing, no planning, no budgeting = no success.  One area in which I feel we went very wrong was that we ignored talking about finances in general early in our relationship. We didn’t avoid the subject, we just never paid any attention to budgeting in our conversations and it left a huge hole to fill.

Continue reading » Managing Family Food Money - Part 2

As I mentioned in my first post, budgeting our family food money has always been something of a struggle. When my wife and I were first married, we verbally decided on some amount of money per month for food (I don’t really remember now how much it was) that seemed reasonable and just did our best to stick to it. Needless to say, we ALWAYS went over budget and the only thing that kept us from going WAY over was usually me instigating family money arguments in addition to nagging my wife every time she bought anything at the store to make sure she hadn’t spent too much.

Also needless to say, this was a VERY ineffective and inefficient method for trying to manage our grocery budget. The next several years were a financial adventure for us, to say the least. By adventure I mean something like showing up to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro in shorts, sandals and one of those silk hawaiian shirts that you can only get away with if you’re actually IN hawaii or your back yard for a BBQ and you don’t mind looking silly. Well I did what any ill-prepared, inexperienced and under-dressed mountain climber would do: I looked around to see what everyone else was doing.

Continue reading » Managing Family Food Money - Part 1