Reducing The Costs Of Shopping

If you are looking to find more money for other areas of your budget, then one area that you might be able to squeeze a bit more could be your grocery budget. This is the easiest area that can normally have some room to move a few extra pennies around.

Setting a grocery budget

Getting to know how much money that you spend each week on food is relatively easy, you need to save all the receipts that you get when purchasing items. You might just do one shop a week, or you might nip to the shops every couple of days. This doesn’t matter; what does matter is totalling the costs of the grocery spend and finding out your average weekly grocery budget.

It is this figure that you are going to need to look at and analyse, to see if there are areas in this spending that you can cut back on.

But when you are looking to cut money off of your grocery shopping you need to do this gradually. Reduce it by no more than £5 per week, and only when you have managed to fit within this reduction should you consider reducing it further.

How to reduce your budget

You need to buy food for your family that is healthy and at a reasonable price. I have found that I save the most money by changing where I shop. The majority of my food shopping is at Aldi. When I first went to shop there ,  never in my wildest dreams did I think I could drop my food shopping bill to the extreme that I managed to, in this shop. I have tried to shop in other supermarkets to match the low budget that I can get in Aldi, and no other shop, including Lidl, comes close to the savings that I can make.

My next saving is to replace the name brand products with the shops own, there are some that are horrid and it is only with trying the products do you find brands that you like. Again, I have no problem with any of the own brand items that Aldi sells. They taste great and they are a lot cheaper than some of the name brand products that are available.

How to use the savings

There are a number of ways that you can put the money that you have saved to good use. You might have needed to cut the price of your shopping bill to find some extra money for a particular bill. But if you have found that a reduction in your grocery budget is disappearing before you are aware of where it is going, then you need to stop. You are doing the hard work by reducing the food shopping bill and then you have increased other areas of spending. This has a negative impact on the reason that you have cut back. You need to decide where you are going to put this saving each week; it could be to help pay for Christmas or even to buy new clothes.

Whatever you choose, make sure that the savings are working hard for you, too.