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Lesson 5- Maximize savings

There are many ways to save money on your food shopping. Here are just a few:

Cooking from scratch instead of buying convenience foods. When you have a well stocked pantry this becomes REALLY easy and faster than you would have guessed. For example, evaporated milk can be made from water and powdered milk. If I am using it in baking, it really isn't that hard or time consuming to toss  powdered milk and water into the mixer with all of my other ingredients.

Using cents off manufacturer's coupons. Get a coupon file or make one. Personally I use two expanding check files that are made of a plastic and should last forever. In the files I have set up categories. My list of categories is here. Coupons can be combined with programs such as ValuPage to increase your savings. What I do to maximize my Valu Page savings is go to ValuPage and print off the bargains at my local store. Then after I am done shopping with the page, I clip out the bar code and tape it to the back of my club card for that store. The bar code number never changes even though the bargains do change. Every time I visit the store I ask the cashier to scan both sides of my club card. In addition to this I am registered for the ValuPage email newsletter so that I get the new offers emailed to me each Tuesday. Our local ads run on Wednesday so when I get the paper on Wednesday the new offers are still pretty fresh in my mind and I try to combine sales, cents off coupons and the Web Bucks from ValuPage for the maximum savings.

Buying in bulk If you have a warehouse or club store nearby be sure to check their prices on the staples you use everyday, flour, salt, sugar, etc. By buying in big packages you can often save over 50%.

Make a Price Book 

Stocking up on loss leaders. Each week most grocery stores put out a flyer with their new sales. Usually the items on the front page are "loss leaders". Loss leaders are items priced really low to get you into the store where, they hope you will do the rest of your shopping.

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