Money & Men

Lower Your Grocery Bill

The economy has never been tighter, and if you’re like the average person, you spend about 20% of your income on food. So, here are a few tips to help lower your grocery bills. We got these from Liz Pulliam Weston, a financial columnist for MSN.

First, grab the weekly grocery circular from your local newspaper, and look at the coupons and items on just the first page. That’s where most of the best deals are. Know this: Some of the products listed in circulars are actually not on sale! So keep track of the prices of items you buy most often so you’ll know when something’s a good deal.

Set the newspaper coupons aside for four or five weeks.

Manufacturers print coupons to promote a product, and a few weeks

later, they often extend the promotion by putting the product on sale. So, if you save your coupons and combine them with the sale price, you’ll save even more. So how can you save on groceries if you don’t get the newspaper? Try the Penny Pincher Gazette at www.ppgazette.com. Just type in your ZIP code, and it’ll list – store by store – the products that are on sale in your area. Even better, each sale item is rated by other readers, so if a product’s got five stars, you’ll know it’s a terrific bargain.

Dump the junk. For example, every time you drink tap water or home-brewed tea instead of soda, you save about a dollar. You can make 10 batches of super-healthy stovetop popcorn for the same price as one giant bag of bad-for-you chips. You can also save money by learning to make frozen favorites from scratch, like pizza and macaroni-and-cheese. You’ll find surprisingly quick and simple recipes in the “easy recipes” section at BetterRecipes.com.