Category Archives: Smart Shopping

Saturday Grocery Round Up

Another week of shopping the sales at two different grocery stores, and the results are still inconclusive. We spent $88 this week, which is about what we’ve spent per week in the past at just one store. Yikes.

However, we did stock up on some meat (a pork tenderloin at $2.84/pound that will serve as three meals and two Porterhouse steaks at an amazing $5.60/pound that will serve as two separate meals). In the past, we’ve spent closer to $100 on weeks when we purchased meat, so this could be a slight improvement.

I’m disappointed that we’re not doing better, but I’ve decided to put in more effort to find manufacturer’s coupons. This is a learning process, and I’m trying not to beat myself up too much this early in the game.

I did discover another great use for the price book today, though. When I ordered 3/4 a pound of turkey at the deli today, the guy told me about a crazy deal. When you buy 1 pound of turkey, you get a half-pound of deli American cheese, a bag of tortilla chips, 4 deli-style sub rolls, and a 2-liter bottle of soda.

So you’re telling me if I add an extra quarter-pound of turkey to my order, all of that is free? OK, I’m sold.

Since I wouldn’t have bought any of that stuff if it wasn’t free, I asked the cashier to double check the receipt before I paid to make sure it came off. He assured me that it did. But when I got home and started adding entries to my price book, I realized that the cheese had not been discounted. It was only $3.25, but that’s not the point. I only took it because I was told it would be free with the turkey, so I wasn’t about to pay for it.

When I went back to the store, they were happy to give me a refund … but not without telling me that it “wasn’t really their fault.” The deal was for yellow American cheese and the nice guy at the deli had sliced white American for me. The fact remains that I didn’t order either. He was kind enough to inform me of the deal, and he gave me what he believed was free. Just because he was mistaken doesn’t mean I should have to pay for it. Whatever, I’m happy to grin and bear their excuses as long as I get my refund. :)

Before I started studying my receipts for my price book, I might not have looked that intently and probably would have missed something like that. Just one more reason I’m glad I started a price book!

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The only credit card I use

When I was in college, I learned “the credit card lesson.” It’s a familiar story. I started with an “emergency card” that I didn’t use for a year. Then I had some car problems that landed my only car in the shop with a $400 bill.

I decided my broken car qualified as a real emergency, so I charged the repairs. When I realized how easy it was to magically have extra money, I started charging stupid things. Pizza, DVDs, bar tabs. I ended up with $4000 in debt over a two-year period.

Luckily, that was enough for me. Obviously $4000 is a lot of debt for a 22-year-old, but it was manageable. I paid the minimum payment every month to keep my credit score high. After I graduated I transferred the balance to a 0% interest card and started doubling and tripling my payments. As of November I’ll be completely free of credit card debt forever. I don’t plan to carry a balance ever again. To me, the interest I’ve payed is a small price for such a valuable life lesson.

Despite my decision to stay away from credit, my husband and I just acquired a new card in May that we use regularly. Why? At the time we were planning a road trip back to our home state of Indiana to get married. We’d carefully constructed a budget months in advance, but we didn’t planned on gas prices skyrocketing to $4 a gallon in May.

To save a little money, we decided to get a BP credit card to charge our gas expenses. The card carried a 10% rebate for the first 60 days, which meant that we got $30 back on the $300 we spent round trip to drive from North Carolina to Indiana to Washington D.C. and back to North Carolina. Basically a free tank of gas.

We continue to use the card for gas even now that the rebate rate has lowered to 5%. We never ever carry a balance, so we never pay interest. The 5% rebate would obviously be pretty silly if we paid a high interest rate. However, because we pay it off every month, we pay 5% less for gas than the price at the pump.

It may not sound like much, but at $4 a gallon, it equals 20 cents per gallon. It lowers our gas budget by about $5 a month, or $60 a year. Since we never pay interest, I say why not save 5%? Every little bit helps.

I also like having our gas bill come once a month in a lump sum. It makes it easier for us to track our expenses and budget.

We choose to travel by car instead of air when we can to save money, so when we make the long trip back to Indiana at Christmas, we’ll automatically save 5% on fuel expenses for the trip.

In most cases, opening a credit card for the “rewards” is a terrible idea. No matter how much you promise to be responsible (“I’ll only use it for groceries and pay it off every month just to get the frequent flier miles”), it almost never works out that way. You spend more than you should or end up charging more than you can afford to pay in a month and the interest starts accruing. But with a gas card, it’s easy to avoid charging unnecessary items or overspending. We don’t consume more gas just because we’re charging it. In my opinion, this is the one case where a credit card rewards program makes sense.

An added bonus: BP offers the option to donate your rebates to the Conservation Fund to help reduce your carbon footprint. We’ve only received one rebate so far (you can only get them in $25 increments), and we requested that rebate in a check to offset the overage in our budget that resulted from $4/gallon gas on the trip. But I like having the option to donate my rebates in the future.

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Does a tax holiday really equal savings?

Now that the weekend is over and I’m safely distanced from North Carolina’s “tax holiday,” I can put my thoughts into perspective.

The first weekend in August every year, North Carolina suspends its sales tax on school-related items including computers, clothing, and school supplies.

This week marks our first anniversary as North Carolina residents. We weren’t here yet during last year’s tax holiday, and I was bummed that we missed it by a few days. But this year I was determined to stay away from the stores to avoid the urge to spend.

It’s easy to give in to the urge to spend when the marketing machine convinces you that you MUST. (I know, I work in marketing.) But it’s important to remember the old adage: you’re not really saving money if you don’t really need it.

It was still hard for me to stay home and avoid buying new clothes that I don’t need, even after all of the progress I’ve made this year. The little voice in my head was saying, “It’s tax-free! That’s 6.75% off! What a great deal!”

Then I reminded myself that I seldom pay full price, especially for clothes. I often only shop when I have coupons for 10% or 20% off. Even then I usually shop the clearance racks and extreme sale prices. I also know that stores were unlikely to have great sale prices because they’d be counting on the tax holiday to drive sales, so I ultimately wouldn’t have saved that much anyway.

So why did I have to fight the urge to rush out and spend just to get a lousy 6.75% discount when I know it’s not going to save me money anyway? The answer is simple: if it’s sold at a discount, no matter how impractical or minute the discount may be, we’re more likely to believe it’s worth buying.

There’s a reason why my neighbors rushed out to the stores this week. It’s the same reason stores slash prices every year the day after Thanksgiving. When it comes to shopping, our culture has created a mob mentality that’s obsessed with savings. It’s dangerous because in a mob we seldom stop to consider the practicality of our actions. When you’re blinded by sales tags, it’s hard to stop and ask yourself, “Do I really need this? Really?”

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve bought an item from the clearance rack because of the low price only to bring it home and never wear it. I’d rather allocate my money to fewer items that I know I’ll use instead of a closet full of sale items that I never wear.

Even if I did need new clothes right now, I would prefer to wait until my head is clear. If I had headed into the stores this weekend drunk on the idea of a tax holiday surrounded by other shoppers who feel the urgent need to BUY NOW BEFORE THE SALES TAX IS REINSTATED, I probably would have gotten caught up in the savings euphoria and spent more than I should. At that point, instead of saving 6.75%, I’d be spending twice what I’d planned on things I didn’t really need or even want.
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Cutting down on food costs

Thanks to some great advice from other personal finance bloggers, I’ve decided that a good place to start cutting back is on the grocery bill. It makes sense; with so many options, it’s easy to take control of what you spend on food.

Grocery spending has always been a financial Achilles heel for us. We have no problem giving up meals out. I tend to think of them as a waste of money unless it’s a special occasion. It’s fun to celebrate with a meal out, but when you’re eating out three times a week it’s no longer a fun novelty; it becomes a burden on your finances and your waistline. Besides, we love to cook healthy meals.

Unfortunately, when it comes to meals at home, we have somewhat extravagant tastes. We’re environmentally and health-conscious, so we often choose to buy organic products despite higher prices. We’re currently spending about $85 a week on groceries. For just the two of us. Obviously, we need to start cutting back.

Because this is the one realm of our finances where my husband has shown a little stubbornness, I want to see how much we can save by putting in a little extra work rather than drastically changing our shopping habits. (The drastic changes will come next.)

We’ve always shopped the sales, tried to plan our meals around them, and avoided excessive amounts of packaged foods and unnecessary snack foods. Avoiding those foods allows us to eat healthier anyway.

However, we have been shopping exclusively at a high-end grocer. I’ve always known we were overpaying, but since my husband is the household chef and he had strong feelings about his grocer of choice, I convinced myself that we were still spending less by eating at home. As long as we were making an effort by planning meals and buying sale items, I considered that a fair compromise.

This weekend, we decided to try shopping at two stores. We did the bulk of our shopping at a lower-priced chain, and bought only sale items at the high-end chain.

I’m using a price book to track prices. My “price book” is a 3×5 card file with a separate card for each item. I’m using dividers to keep the cards in alphabetical order. I considered using a notebook, but ultimately I wanted control over how it’s organized, and I want to easily add additional items and keep them alphabetized. I’ve only used it one week, but it seems pretty easy so far.


My husband actually liked the cheaper store. He liked the way it was organized, and he agreed that the prices were lower. Even though he gets a 5% student discount at the high-end grocery store, I still think we spent less without the discount. It’ll take a few weeks of price book entries before we can be sure, though. To account for the discount at the high-end store, I’m entering items that we buy there at the discounted rate.

We only spent about $12 under our average ($73) by splitting our shopping into two trips, but I expect to lower that gradually as we get the hang of using our price book and planning our meals around two sales instead of one. I’m hoping to get the bill down to $50-$60 a week eventually. I think that should allow us to continue eating some of the organic foods we enjoy without overspending excessively.