How I Saved $228 with These Grocery Tips

Grocery Tips Saved Me $228.07 on Groceries in 2 Weeks!

Homemaker Barbi has partnered with Oscar Mayer and Ellie Kay to bring you grocery tips that can revolutionize the way you spend your family’s grocery money! (If you missed it, read the 12 Grocery Saving Tips here.)

To prove it, I took the 2 week Oscar Mayer “Get Savings Savvy Challenge” myself to see just how much money I would save.  Check out the video I made (below) to see how the challenge works, and to learn how to use tip #2 to set up a Kids Lunch Station in your house (subscribers will have to click through to HomemakerBarbi.com to view the video).

Below are a few of the tips that my family tried, how they worked for us, and most importantly, how much money they saved us: $228.07!

Tip #1a- Pack a lunch to take to school. Savings: $12.10. 

This tip might seem insignificant until you figure out how much lunch really costs.  A child buying hot lunch at school can easily be spending a large chunk of your grocery budget ONLY on one meal per day.

For my daughter to buy hot lunch for 2 weeks, it would cost $30! By way of comparison, I figured out how much a lunch from home cost (calculated from actual prices and serving sizes of the ingredients): Peanut butter and jelly sandwich: 72¢, Yogurt: 59¢, Snack crackers: 10¢, Orange: 38¢ = Cost for lunch from home: $1.79.

The savings from packing her lunch for 2 weeks was $12.10, which might not seem like much, but for the entire school year our savings would be $193.60!  Keep in mind we only have 1 child in school; imagine if we had 5 school-aged kids, like my friend Happy Housewife. She’d be saving $968 a year.

Tip #1b- Pack a lunch to take to work.  Savings: $80. My husband ate lunch at home every day for the last 2 weeks instead of eating fast food on his lunch break.  He’d normally spend $8 per meal at Taco Bell (near his work). By my husband eating leftovers at home, we saved $80!

Tip #2- “Big to Little”. Savings: $20. Repackaging large quantities of food into single servings was my favorite tip (and one that I was already practicing), as you could probably tell in the video above. Example: a 3-pack of Hannah Montana lunch-sized packs of dried cranberries cost $4.12, while a whole bag of dried cranberries cost only $1.68! I saved approximately $20 by using this tip for 2 weeks’ worth of snacks.

Tip #4- Have a soup and sandwich night. Savings: $20. As directed, we had 1 soup and sandwich meal per week (and it saved me time, too!). Making homemade bread would lower the cost even more.

Tip #5- “Fast Food Switcheroo”. Savings: $60. We bought enough convenience foods for 2 meals (think frozen pizzas) to take the place of going out to a restaurant when I didn’t have time to cook dinner. Considering that our restaurant tabs would’ve been between $40 and $50, this tip worked wonders.

Tip #12- Go Beyond the List.  Savings: $35.97. I often find the best sales when I least expect them. It’s important to allow myself to buy things not on my shopping list when I find these great deals, and to stock up by buying a large quantity to maximize my savings.  To take advantage of this tip, don’t just look for your list items; keep your eyes open for clearance tags and sale signs for unadvertised specials.

This week I bought a lot of items that weren’t originally on my list because they were on sale, such as: 6 loaves of bread to freeze, coffee, crackers, 11 pounds of ground turkey, pomegranates, and more.  By watching for these sales and stocking up, I RARELY pay full price for the grocery items I need. You can do the same!

This challenge proved a valuable point to me:

Grocery shopping is a large spending category in which we can plan ahead and shop smarter to spend less on groceries without sacrificing quality or nutritional value.  Go ahead, take the Get Savings Savvy Challenge and see how much you save!  I’d love to know how you do- feel free to email savings(at)HomemakerBarbi(dot)com or leave your experience in the comments. Now get saving!