In my Yahoo!Finance column that posts June 5, I review some online tools that help cut your grocery bill by $100 a week. One of those is Couponmom.com, run by an Atlanta mother of two, Stephanie Nelson. I used her site this week for my grocery shopping, and paid about $80 for a week’s worth of groceries for five people, including six nutritious dinners (Fridays are pizza night around here). 

You can register free for the site, and read Nelson’s e-book on how to use the system. But here’s the quick how-to: 

1. Subscribe to your local Sunday paper. (Since 80 percent of coupons come from the Sunday paper, Nelson says, the savings will more than pay for the subscription). Nelson recommends buying an extra copy or two of the paper if it’s a good week for coupons. Pull out the coupon inserts, note the date in large print on the front, and store them in the same place every week. (You can also find coupons in the “grocery coupon database” on couponmom.com, as well as sites like couponmaster.com and couponclippers.com.) 

2. Log on to couponmom.com and click “grocery deals by state.” Choose your state and store from the drop-down menu. You’ll see a list of items on sale, and to the left, a code indicating where you can find the matching coupon (these codes are explained on the main grocery coupon database page.) You’ll also see the date the coupon came out, when it expires, how much you’ll save, and how many you have to buy.  

3. Create your menus based on items on sale that have a coupon. Alternately, you can write out your shopping list, go to the “search deals” box and enter an item on your list, i.e., “toothpaste.” The site will tell you if the store is running a special and provide a list of every coupon for toothpaste that came out in your local newspaper. 

4. Get a small spiral notebook and create a “price book” to track the prices of the item you buy most often, so you can identify when they’re at their lowest, and stock up at that time. Think about your most expensive, most frequently purchased items, says Nelson. Cutting the cost of your top 10 to 20 regular purchases will produce an immediate difference in your grocery bill.  Create a page for each item (two pages if you shop at more than one store).

Create four columns for each shopping week with the date “week 1 (May 15), week 2 (May 22)” etc. Then write down the price each week (just take the prices off the receipt when you get home). The longer you track the prices the better idea you’ll have of the range. Once you’ve identified the lowest prices, write down all 20 items and their lowest cost on a single page to take it with you, so you know when to stock up. 

A few other tips: Don’t be brand loyal – grab the best deal. In addition, “go to store as infrequently as possible,” says Nelson. “Otherwise you’ll stop in for bananas and gallon of milk and walk out with a cart that wipes out your grocery budget.” Finally, if you get an item for free by combining a sale with a coupon, consider donating it to a food pantry.

• Check Your Receipts for Errors
• Discounts for Last-Minute Shoppers
• Costco Coupon Policy
• My First Grocery Freebie
• How to Save in Every Room of Your Home

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 6:46 am and is filed under Money & Happiness, budgeting, food/groceries, saving, spending. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.