Frugal Friday! 7 Tips to Reduce Your Grocery Bill

Lee — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 05:14:42 +0000

Every Friday I publish “Frugal Friday!”, an open-ended series with some of the simple and best ways to really save you money both now and in the future.

This week I’m focusing on short, sharp tips that could save you hundreds of pounds over the course of a year while food shopping.

Never Shop on an Empty Stomach

You know the drill. It’s early evening, you are tired from work, starving hungry and find no food in the house. By some miracle you resist the temptation to ring the local Indian delivery folks, and instead shuffle back in your car to visit your local supermarket. You have nothing in mind particularly beyond getting home again, and as a result end up massively overspending. Your hunger did your shopping, rather than any conscious plan you may have had.

Eat before you go shopping. If you are not hungry when you go, then tantalising offers that are not already on your shopping list will likely be easily ignored. Which neatly brings me to my next point…

Write a List

Going shopping without a list is a disaster waiting to happen. You buy loads of things you don’t need, forget half the stuff you do, and get loads of “extras” on the side.

To combat this, work out a meal plan for the week ahead and everything you’ll need to buy to make it happen. If you are going to do some batch cooking in the week, see what you already have in the store cupboards before adding them to the list.

If it isn’t on the list – don’t buy it!

And leave the pen at home… adding it to the list afterwards is cheating.

Calculate a Budget

Much like having a list is important for not over-spending, so is having an idea of where ‘overspending’ would be in the first place. Everyone will have their own idea for a budget, but £50 per person per month is not unreasonable to aim for if you have the time to batch cook. That is my own personal food budget, and mostly, I manage to achieve that these days.

Slow Down & Scan

The items on the shelves at eye-level are the most profitable products. You see a jar of pasta sauce the moment you walk into the aisle and grab it, throw it in your basket and zoom off to the next item in the list.

You just fell for the oldest marketing trick in the book. Next time slow down and study the prices. Scan the entire shelf from top to bottom and look at the cost per unit calculations most supermarkets provide in the super-small-print on the shelf labels. If you take a moment to compare prices you can save upwards of 100% on the purchase price of some items.

Try Downshifting

Downshifting isn’t about suffering a cheaper product, it is about finding a cheaper product where you cannot honestly tell the difference between it and a more expensive brand. If you have a habit of always buying “Finest” or “Taste The Difference” or some other premium product, try a brand name instead. If you’re feeling particularly adventurous, try stores-own. You’ll often save pounds per product doing this and likely won’t notice a shred of difference when cooked.

Some premium brands and stores-own are even made in the same factory. The only difference is the packaging and the price.

Shop at Reduction Hour

My father makes a killing doing this. He very rarely goes shopping before 8pm, which is precisely when our local Tesco begins doing the final knock-downs on things that are going out of date the next day or so. It is not uncommon for him to come home with bagfuls of items at 10p here, 20p there where the original cost would have been pounds here and pounds there instead.

Anything that will not be eaten or turned into a batched meal gets frozen until it is needed and remains just as good and just as flavoursome as the full priced equivalent.

Never Turn Down ‘Free’

Quite regularly my mother will include me in meals she makes for herself, or my father will invite me out to lunch to catch up. Never turn down these opportunities, as it’s a great way to spend extra time with friends and family, and shave costs from your food bill as well.

Happy Friday, and Happy (Cheaper) Shopping!

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Frugal Friday! Batch Cooking

Lee — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 06:34:09 +0000

One of the ways I enjoy saving money (for paying off debt quicker, of course) is to batch cook. The average UK household – if the people I watch in Tesco are anything to go by – seems to live on prepacked microwave meals, pizza and takeaways.

If you enjoy cooking though there’s a much cheaper alternative.

Cooking in Batch

This sounds complicated but is actually really easy to do. All it involves is cooking more than you plan to eat right now, portioning out the remainder and either putting it in the fridge, freezing it, or a combination of the two. Batch cook several meals over the course of a week and before you know it you have a fab selection of home made food in the freezer that can be taken out at a moment’s notice and popped in the microwave.

Good steaming hot home made food in 5 minutes flat. Because it’s frozen you can even take it to work for lunch providing you have a microwave available.

A Quick Example

I love Chinese takeaway, but I really dislike paying for it. So as I was going out anyway, I combined journeys and diverted to Tesco before coming home. Scouring the reduced areas (I was going to cook when I got home), I managed to pick up:

A family-sized packet of ready cut Chinese vegetables (70p down from £1.50),
2 cooked meat-counter hot & spicy sausages (50p down from £1.85),
A bag of fresh egg noodles expiring today (20p down from £1),
3 giant red onions (30p down from £1.05),
3 giant mild red chillies (20p down from £1),
A clove of garlic (full price at 30p),
A packet of sweet sticky chilli stir-fry sauce (full price at £1)

Method

I already had the olive oil to fry off of the onion so that was done first. After softening and turning a nice golden brown, I sprinkled some sugar in to caramelise, and then added the giant packet of vegetables. After gently frying it down for about 10 minutes I added the sauce, chillies and noodles. Mixed well, and divided equally into some snap-shut plastic containers – the ones your Chinese delivery normally arrives in!

Tip: Save these plastic containers – they fit together to take up next to no space anyway and are great for doing this with. Wash them out, and store dry. They are reusable, microwave and dishwasher safe.

Calculate The Saving

After cooking and portioning out, I’d managed to feed myself for lunch yesterday, and I also made up 5 containers for freezing.

If I’d not purchased the discounted items, then the total meal cost would have come to £7.70 which made each meal £1.28. This is still very cheap for a Chinese meal, but being frugal, I am not ashamed to shop in the knock-down sections first. The total cost of the items I bought was £3.20 making each portion just 53p – over two and a half times cheaper!

Now the kicker: I always shop in Tesco, and where possible, get my fuel there as well. The end result is lots of Tesco ClubCard points and vouchers. I actually cashed in a £2 voucher for this shop, so I only really spent £1.20, making each dish just 20p.

Need Inspiration?

There’s no shortage of recipe repositories online, but if you want ones with frugal wholesome living in mind, check out this amazing list of ideas from the dedicated people over at the MSE forums.

If you find yourself using the excuse “I don’t have the time / energy to cook” when you get home from work, then batch cooking is a great way not to just save money but keep your pennies to yourself and save yourself time later on in the week as well.

Have you tried batch cooking before?

p.s. Frugal Friday is published every Friday and includes a frugal tip for money saving. To see every Frugal Friday post, click ‘Frugal Friday’ under Categories to the right.