Create a price list

Create a price list for watching for good deals on regularly purchased products. A Full Cup http://www.afullcup.com/ is a website for coupon swappers. They suggest you create a products list so that you can watch for coupons on the products that will really help your budget because you use them regularly.

You can take that project one step further by walking through the store occasionally and jotting down the price of each item. I went through two of our local grocery competitors, the military commissary, and our local warehouse with the same list. The comparison between final costs of the entire purchase was just amazing. That week in our specific location the stores ranked BJs, Giant, Commissary, and then Safeway as the most expensive. No more Safeway for us unless there was an advertised sale that we couldn't beat.

This can be as elaborate or simple as works for you. I'm a certified mathematician and loved the challenge of working through this once and I needed a second time to verify my results, which it did. After that I felt like I knew my stores pretty well. That price list let me watch sales sheets for good deals and know which stores might have specific categories of food at a better price if I was willing to shop at more than one store. There are Smartphone apps available which let you enter product prices for different stores. Some also even act as your shopping list.