It all started with one specific item I wanted to find a good deal on. It was a learning toy for my oldest son and I found a few stores that had it on sale at a good price. Then I noticed that a few stores were also selling some of the accessories for it at pretty cheap prices. So, I decided to start skimming the black friday ads online to see which stores had the best sales or else sales on the largest number of items that I wanted. Before I knew it, I had tagged five or six different stores with “good deals” on some items that were kind of on my radar to give as gifts. After all, I was going to be out anyway shopping for that “one” item so why not go ahead and take advantage of the other sales too… right?

So after being up all day Thanksgiving day, I brought my family home from the in-laws at 11:00PM and put the already-asleep kids in bed. Then, I headed to my first sale starting at midnight and continued shopping until 8:00AM… Now before you judge me too harshly, you should know that I got some really good deals on a lot of things. However, I also ended up getting sucked in to the classic sales pitch where you spend $100 to save $5 and walk away feeling like you really saved $5! After I got home and got some sleep, I started thinking about everything that I purchased and realized that over half of the money I spent that night/morning was on stuff that I had no intention of buying before I left on my little shopping excursion. I fell for the “good deals” and ended up buying stuff just because it was on a really good sale even though I didn’t really need it.

So learn from my mistake when you go shopping this holiday season and stick to your shopping list. Don’t let yourself get tricked into buying more than you can afford just because something is a good deal. Another good way to avoid this is to take a shopping buddy with you. I’ll write more about that later though. In the meantime, happy shopping!

This has worked really well for us for the past several years but there was always a problem. Along with bi-weekly pay periods, we were allowing our grocery budget to follow the same bi-weekly schedule. Every time we would hit a month with 3 paychecks, we were forced to also make a sudden shift to our grocery budget where we had to wait 3 weeks in between grocery money being added for 2 grocery cycles and then we could go back to normal after that. Needless to say, this was almost impossible.

Finally I got smart. I realized that in a six month period, there are 13 pay periods (again, assuming that there are 26 bi-weekly pay periods in a year). So we switched our grocery budget schedule from 14 days in between money being added to 15 days. Just ONE more day every grocery cycle made all the difference! It is almost imperceptible to us that we have to wait one more day in each pay cycle before more family food money gets added to the account but the result is that we no longer have to try to stretch out the “missing” pay cycle in the 3-paycheck month. The ONLY downside, if there even is one, is that we have to maintain a separate grocery budget schedule instead of just relying on the pay periods to tell us when “grocery day” will be.

As I did with the original post, I would recommend anyone to try this if you think you can make it work. It has really helped us keep our family budget running smooth from month to month and I love having a reserve of food money just in case anything unexpected happens.

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!

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.

I can understand not wanting to sit down with the Sunday paper every week and start scouring the ads and coupon flyers for things that I may or may not want to buy in the near future. I don’t understand how, in a day when a majority of people have at least limited access to the internet, consumers are still not using the vast resources available to them. I did a search on Google for Grocery Coupons and just the first 20 results were all links to tools or programs geared towards helping me find coupons that I will use. I’ll be checking some of these tools out and writing about them here. If you have a favorite way of collecting and using coupons, write a comment about it here.

By the way, here are the results from this poll at ask 500 people (click on show results if it just shows the question):

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 shown below. If you don’t use a list when you go grocery shopping, give it a try for a month or so and you might be surprised with the results.

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.

Every 6 months we take that extra paycheck (admittedly, not the WHOLE paycheck but a definite majority of it) and put it in a separate savings account. Each month, we fund our grocery checking account half with money from my regular paychecks and half with money from this supplemental savings account. This has helped our budget considerably because it has the appearance of cutting our grocery budget in half each month. It also feels good to have a reserve of food money sitting in the bank in case of any emergency (such as a loss of job which seems to be so prevalent nowadays).

Ok, so maybe that’s not so tricky, but I thought it was clever. I’ll admit too that the months that have three paychecks do feel a bit tight when you are taking a bunch of money out for groceries, but it really has become a staple to making our grocery budget work for us. If you think you have the willpower, give it a try!

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.

When you’re all done, you can print it out and take it to the store(s) with you. This is a huge time and money saver for any grocery shopper! This makes it so easy to include two or three stores in your grocery shopping trip without feeling like you are running all over town for no reason. This will actually save you time because you know before you even go into the grocery store exactly what items you are getting because you saw it all online from the comfort of your home.

I also recommend you check out the version put together at bellaonline.com for comparing grocery prices. This is powered by the www.groceryguide.com, but they have put it together in a little different format that I like better.

Don’t forget to come back and leave a comment about what you think of this grocery list tool.

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.

The result was that we each entered the marriage not really knowing what the other’s philosophy was on budgeting. In fact, for the first several months we both continued to maintain our existing checking and savings accounts separately and just paid the bills out of each account as needed. Once we finally did combine everything, it was apparent that we had very different styles of managing money.

Simply put, I turned out to be the better money manager between the two of us (and yes, my wife would actually admit to this ;)). We began communicating more on money matters, especially where the family food money came into play. However, for the next couple of years we still weren’t on the same page because we still weren’t REALLY budgeting together.

Although we were talking about the family food budget, we would both walk away with our own ideas of what we had decided. She would then act (in good faith) on what she thought we had talked about and I would get frustrated when things hadn’t turned out how I had envisioned. The problem, as I see it, was singular: I was budgeting and THEN discussing it with my wife as opposed to DISCUSSING the budget with her.

As an example, I might sit down and go through our bills and income and decide through some not entirely arbitrary means that we had $150 for family food money for the next two weeks. I would then tell my wife that we could only spend $150 on groceries over the next two weeks without much explanation, just stressing the amount. When she would shop, she would get the things that we needed and might come home and say: “I got all the shopping done and I only went over by $15!!”

I should mention that I had no idea what we should be spending on our grocery budget each month, but no matter how much we spent, it seemed like a lot to me. Before I say anything else, I would also like to point out that my wife is great.  I hope this isn’t making it sound like I’m pointing any fingers at her.  Anyway, we’ve come a long way since then and we still have a ways to go. I still do the vast majority of the budgeting, but I go into a lot more detail when we talk about it.

Along the way, I found a little trick that makes our monthly family food budget seem like it’s cut in half.  I’ll tell you all about it in the next and final post in this series (Part 3).

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.

For anyone who has done even the smallest amount of reading about family budgeting and money management, I’m sure that you may have heard of the “envelope method.” If you haven’t, that’s ok, keep reading and I’ll briefly explain. It probably has many names, but the idea is to take your pay check and divide up the money into different categories such as: bills, fun, taxes, tithing, etc. Some people break it down even further and have separate “envelopes” for different kinds of bills or instead of “fun,” they may have separate envelopes for eating out and movies. Anyway, you get the idea.

Well, I came up with the perfect plan that was going to end all of our problems (famous last words, I know). We decided to create a separate checking account that was to be used only for food money. This way, there would never be a problem spending more than we had budgeted because there simply wouldn’t be more money to spend!! Brilliant! Except for one thing…

I found out that spending habits don’t change just because the amount of money in the account has changed. In fairness to my wife and me, the concept was a good one but the problem was in our execution. At this point, instead of just going over budget, we were regularly overdrafting our grocery checking account. This put us into somewhat of a downward spiral since each time we would fund the account with money from the latest paycheck, we were already starting out in the hole.

We limped along this way for a while fooling ourselves by saying: “next time we’ll do better.” Since I had, after all, come up with the perfect plan, I decided that I must have misjudged the amount of money needed for food and groceries and so devised the perfect revision to the perfect plan (famous last words…again). There was a little extra money floating around in our budget so I figured if I just added another $30 per month to the food money without telling my wife (who didn’t really keep tabs on our accounts at the time), then we would no longer overdraw the account and everything would be peachy!

Another good theory, yet somehow, almost magically, we began to consume that extra $30 per month and STILL overdrafted the account just as regularly and by just as much as before. Amazing! We certainly didn’t seem to be making any headway with our grocery budget, but we had unknowingly enrolled in a self-directed course called family money management 101. If only I’d known then that the course was going to span the next few years…