Stockpiling & The Grocery Game

Stockpiling is essential to saving money! The whole purpose is to stock up on things at the bottom dollar price so that when you run out of it you will have it and not have to go out and pay full price for that item!

I've started slowly on stockpiling because we are like any other family now days pretty tight on funds so having a lot of extra money laying around to just buy things we don't need immediately isn't an option most weeks. But getting a good stockpile going will be essential in saving money in the future. So here is what I do....

#1 Every Monday I sit at the kitchen table while the girls color and I go through my fridge and freezer and pantry and keep an inventory list of what I have. This list stays on the fridge and as we use things we cross them off the list then Monday's I update it. This is important and will save you money because sometimes we tend to buy things we already have wasting money. I also do this with my stockpile.

#2 In order to save money you must have a weekly budget you can use on groceries. Lets say you decide on $100.00 per week. In order to start your stockpile I would designate $10.00 of that grocery budget to stockpiling and the rest to necessities. As your stockpile grows your necessities that you buy weekly will decrease giving you more $ for stockpiling. I started with $10.00 and am now pretty much at $50.00 stockpiling and $50.00 in necessities and still working on getting the necessities down lower!

#3 Don't feel overwhelmed with trying to find all the "deals" sign up for The Grocery Game. When you sign up you get a 4 week trial for $1.00 then after the trial it's $10.00 for one store every 8 weeks and $5.00 for an additional store. Each Tuesday they come out with a list of specials for your chosen stores. All the items are color-coded and tell you the items to buy now, items to buy only if you need them, and items that will be free with coupons. They also tell you when to use the coupon for a certain item because just because it's on sale doesn't mean it's the rock bottom price. This saves me TONS of time weekly!!

#4 If your not going to sign up for The Grocery Game, you will need to get yourself a notebook. Sit down with the weekly ads and go through them one by one writing down each deal that looks good to you according to store. After making your list go back and figure out which ones are better and cross out the ones that you aren't going to keep. This will allow you to easily compare prices of same items at different stores.

#5 Subscribe or make sure to pick up the Sunday paper in order to clip coupons. Only clip the coupons you know you will use, and then keep your inserts in a folder up to 2-3mo just in case there is a deal. It will take you a while to really get a good stash of coupons, probably about 12 weeks to really get them established. Remember if there is an item on sale one week there is no rule you can't buy more than 1 paper to get more than 1 coupon.