When I first looked at our household spending to analyse areas in which we could cut back and save money, I realised that we were haemorrhaging money on food. It’s easy to do – psychologically, we tell ourselves that this is ‘necessary’ spending. We made every mistake in the book: going shopping with no list, shopping multiple times a week, eating out too often, ordering takeaway because we were too tired to cook after a long day’s work, to name but a few. I figured out quickly that this was the line item that was going to save us the most money, and fast. So, here are 10 steps I developed and still use today to keep grocery spending under control.
1. Plan all your meals and cooking
I started by meal-planning for the following week. Select a day and time and schedule it every week. This will get you in a routine and help you to create a habit. Plan out every meal for the following week for the whole family and most importantly when you will cook. To really save money in this category, limit the number of meals to 2-3 per week and alternate with leftovers. This will mean that you won’t have to buy many ingredients, but you will have to eat the same thing a few times in a row. We don’t mind that in our house and I have trained our kids in this method from when they were toddlers, so they don’t know any different.
2. Shop your house
When you start planning your meals for the following week, begin by shopping your house. Do a quick inventory and check whether you have any items nearing the expiration date. If so, build your meals around those items. Are there any items that would go well together in certain recipes? For example, if you have minced beef and spaghetti, it would make sense to make a spaghetti bolognaise next week. At the same time, you can begin writing your shopping list for other items you may want to purchase as you check your house. I used to buy things all the time only to realise I already had the item lurking at the back of a cupboard. I keep a handy list on my fridge of items I tend to purchase every week, for example, milk, bread and eggs. I check whether these products need replenishing as I am performing my inventory and considering what meals to cook the next week.
3. Use toddler recipe books
One of my personal favourite hacks! I used simple toddler recipes when I was weaning my kids, and I still use them now for many of our meals. They tend to use simple ingredients and be healthy, easy-to-make and budget-friendly meals. The only thing is that they can be bland, so I just add herbs and spices to create more depth of flavour. If you don’t have toddler recipe books, google toddler recipes and there are a huge number of recipes to choose from on the internet.
4. Recipe hacks
I almost always double the recipe on anything I am going to cook. This saves money and time. I also tend to choose meals that I can easily cook in bulk and save the leftovers for the following days. For example, I would be much more likely to choose dinners like casserole, bolognaise, soups, lasagne and curries than meals like fajitas or steak and chips. That is because I can make a huge pot and save it, just cooking some rice, pasta or potatoes the next time I want to feed it to my family. The other recipe hack to try is to cook meals in the same week which use similar ingredients. For example, if I am cooking pesto pasta and I have to buy a jar of pesto but won’t use it all in one dinner, I will search for other recipes using pesto and cook them in the same week.
5. Shop the deals at different places
OK, so you have your meals planned out, have completed your inventory and have created a shopping list. I also include cleaning products and toiletries within the grocery budget, so they will go on the list if they need replacing. At this stage, it may be worth doing a quick check of deals at different supermarkets, although I wouldn’t spend too much time obsessing over this. If you’re not careful, you could spend hours analysing every deal to save just a few dirhams. The time spent researching and buying from different places may not be worth the money saved. You have to calculate that trade-off for yourself, but personally, I tend to spend a few minutes checking whether the big supermarkets have any significant sales or discounts.
Some people also prefer purchasing specific items at certain places; for example, in the UAE, many people like buying their meat and produce from Kibsons as they are reputed to have a superior quality range of these items. However, in general I find that you can save money and time in the long run by buying most of your items at one store. I am all for simplicity and not having to calculate how much one total is and add it to another etcetera. Keeping it straightforward means you are more likely to make this a habit. If you make it too complicated, you are less likely to stick to it week in, week out.
6. Online shopping
This one was a game changer for me. When I switched to online shopping, I saved so much money. Wary at first, I was especially cautious about purchasing things like fruit and vegetables, but here in the UAE at least, I have been pleasantly surprised at the quality of items delivered to me. I love that I can shop in my pjs in peace at home when the kids have gone to bed so I can actually focus on what I’m doing. Price comparison is easily done without having to match the labels on the shelves to the correct items, akin to completing a Rubik’s cube.
I set myself a hard limit for the total amount I will spend on groceries. I ensure that I stick to it by adding whatever is on my list to the shopping cart. Then, when I click on the checkout to pay, if the total is over my budgeted amount, I go through and remove products completely or cut the amount I am buying until I reach my maximum budgeted limit for groceries that week. This is not as difficult as it seems. For example, as you add the items to your cart, you may click on 5 packs of wipes as it is easier to purchase in bulk. But when you get to the checkout, you can reduce to 2 packs as that will see you through the next week as you realise the rest was excess, and thus stick to your budget. If you are over your budgeted amount when you get to the checkout, it also forces you to consider what is necessary for the following week and what you are buying just because you want it.
NB if your budget is too stretched each week and you are struggling to purchase even necessary items, you should consider extending your grocery allowance and looking to make cuts elsewhere in your budget.
7. Buy store brands in bulk
There is an argument for buying in bulk and an argument against buying in bulk, essentially represented by frugalists and minimalists. This blog post is not going to go into the argument for or against as both have merits, and we don’t have the scope here to give them both justice. Needless to say, if something you are purchasing in any case and will use in the future is on sale, then why not purchase in bulk? For example, if you are buying bin bags and you see a great deal for 50% off and you have the capacity to store them in your home, then it may be worth buying them in bulk. Additionally, items such as cleaning products, condiments, frozen fruit and vegetables, medicine, pasta & rice, household staples such as kitchen roll and milk and juice have virtually the same ingredients as their more-expensive branded counterparts. My advice if you are unsure whether to buy store-brand: trial it once. If it lacks quality compared with the branded product, then buy the branded item next time. You might be pleasantly surprised by the quality of home brands and the money you save.
8. Batch cook all your meals and snacks
Right, so you have planned your meals, diligently created your list and completed your online shop. The shopping has been delivered to you. Success! Not quite… A lot of people get so far and fall at this hurdle. Remember in point 1, I said plan out meals and cooking? You should do your meal planning at a certain time of the week, your grocery shopping at a specific time and allocate time to cook. This should be a time when you are not exhausted, busy or overwhelmed. A Wednesday evening at 6pm after a mammoth day of work when you have kids demanding things and the phone is ringing and the doorbell is buzzing is probably not the best time. I opt for a weekend morning – my husband takes the kids out to the park or for a playdate – and I put a Podcast or audiobook on and batch cook for the whole of the next week, or as much as I possibly can.
You have to look at your schedule and see what works for your family, but that works for us at the moment. Is it ideal? No, my ideal scenario would be working part time or freelancing so that I can do my batch cooking in the week and free up the entire weekend for my family. But that is not possible right now, so we organise our schedule like this to work towards the ideal scenario. To me, it’s better than dealing with the guilt of throwing away expired food after calling a takeaway because I was too exhausted to cook.
My final hack is that as well as meals, you can batch-cook snacks. I usually cook two large dinners and one or two snacks, such as a batch of blueberry muffins or cereal bars. Saves a ton of money and you have healthy (ish) snacks on hand for hungry kids and lunchboxes. Seriously, do they ever stop eating?
9. Freeze food
This hack helps take the mental load off the primary caregiver who also has to work full-time as well as saving you money. I’ll cook a massive haul of food on a weekend morning, so how do we eat it all before it goes bad? We don’t. I separate it into different Tupperware containers. Whatever we don’t eat that day either goes into the fridge if it is to be eaten over the next couple of days or gets labelled with the name and date and frozen. The result is that you start to build an excess of frozen meals that you can pull out at any given time. If it’s a busy week at work or you aren’t feeling well, you don’t have to reach for a takeaway, you can pull a ready-made meal from the freezer. I use the oldest items first so store them near the front, and fresh food gets stored near the back. This way, you can alternate meals on different days too to alleviate boredom. The same applies to snacks for kids’ lunchboxes – I have built up a stash in the freezer, so I don’t always have to bake at the same rate every week.
10. What if I have to go to the supermarket?
I often visit the supermarket. Perhaps the online delivery service did not stock the item I wanted, or there was a mistake in delivery. I try to do online where possible, but this might happen. Some tips to avoid blowing your budget the minute you step into that golden fortress housing row upon row of shiny objects just waiting to be selected and placed in your trolley:
- Lay out your list like the grocery shop that you will most likely shop at. For example, if the toiletries aisle is the first one you walk through when you enter, list toiletries first and so on. This will allow you to work efficiently through the supermarket and stick to your list.
- Do not go when you are hungry, stressed or tired. You will buy more.
- Look up and down in the aisles. Often, the most expensive items are displayed at eye level.
- Schedule your trip right before an appointment so that you have a limited time to finish the shop. This will prevent you from browsing and impulse-spending.
I hope that list of hacks helps you. It seems like a lot, but when you establish a routine, it will all become second nature and I guarantee it will save you money. I managed to slash our grocery budget in half while feeding my family of 4 healthy, wholesome meals. They are simple recipes, but nobody has ever complained in my house! Plus, time has been freed up by scheduling the meal planning, grocery shopping and batch cooking pieces of the ‘feeding a family’ puzzle.
If you would like to book a financial accountability coaching session to help you work through these steps or stay accountable to your goals, send me an email at [email protected] or drop me a line via the contact form and we can see if we are a good match.
Good luck on your financial journey – congratulations on taking the leap.