How You Can Save on Food Expenses

You don’t need plain green loans in order to get by on your finances.  Living paycheck to paycheck is common, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to have in common.  If you can take a look at your who financial picture, starting from tracking every dollar coming in, and going out, you can hope to reduce expenses so you can free up extra money to build an emergency fund, payoff debt, and save for retirement.  Cutting expenses off what you’re spending on food is a good place to start.

Avoid Going Out to Eat

It’s nice to go to your favorite restaurant, order whatever you want off the menu, be served, not to mention cleaned up afterwards, but it does come at a cost.  Whether you are stopping for coffee and a bagel every morning, going out to lunch at work, or grabbing carryout or taking the family out to dinner, it can add up pretty quickly.  If you can avoid going out to eat for the most part and go grocery shopping instead, preparing meals at home, you can watch the savings add up right away.

Coupons are Still in Style

Although it’s sad that newspaper subscriptions are on the decline and you may not be sitting looking through the sale papers any longer, clipping coupons, but that doesn’t mean that saving money on coupons are dead.  With the amount of mail, we get on a daily basis, there’s likely plenty of ways to save money at the grocery store.  In addition, take a look on the grocer’s website, as you can load digital coupons to your card and watch the savings come off at the register, the only trick is, you have to remember which coupons are on your card.

Shop on the Right Days

If you’ve gone to the grocery store after work, especially on the weekends, you know that it can be a mad house, fighting for parking spots, trying to get through the aisles, and not to mention, waiting in the long checkout lanes.  If you go during mid-week, later in the evening, you will hardly find a soul in the aisle with you, so you can easily get in and out, not to mention it’s a great way to save money as well.  Lots of times you’ll see in-store savings during the week that you will not find on the weekend, where grocers don’t have to put much on sale since they’re have a full store anyways.

Never Leave Without a List (or on an Empty Stomach)

The grocery store can be overwhelming, which is always why you hear about people that run in for milk or eggs and come out with a full shopping cart full of items.  If you don’t go in without a list, you start to go up and down the aisles, putting items you don’t need in the cart.  Same goes when you shop on an empty stomach.  When you’re hungry, just about everything sounds good and you’ll likely come home with plenty of items that hurt your wallet and your waistline.