What do you do with your receipts when you get home from grocery shopping? File them away, or more likely throw them away. Don't! Your grocery store receipts are powerful tools in getting your grocery budget under control, and if you don't have a food budget they provide powerful insight to your food spending, which you probably need to get a handle on.
My monthly food budget for my family of four is $600. I know people who can do it for much less, but it works for us. I choose organic products whenever available because I believe the costs are worth the benefits to our health even if they are a bit more costly.
One of the major reasons people give for not eating more healthily is that it is too expensive.With proper planning this simply is not true. One strategy I use to save money on my grocery bill is to keep my receipts and use them as planning tools. It gets you out of the pressure of the store, and allows time to reflect on your shopping habits and purchases. Leaving you better able to put things into proper perspective.
Benefits of Using Grocery Store Receipts:
- Grocery store prices don't change very much. If you use the prices from the receipts to plan your shopping, you will have no surprises when you get to the cashier.
- When you are entering your prices you can start to see trends in your shopping. Did you really need to buy three types of chips? Wow, that organic broccoli only cost...!
- If you use the prices of the food and align it with your grocery list, you can discipline yourself by only bringing $10-$20 over what your projected costs are. This way you will stick to your budget while accounting for small price changes and things you mistakenly left off your list.
- By empowering yourself with the knowledge of how much your groceries really cost, you know where you stand in your food budget. You can then make adjustments that are needed. Like bringing your lunch to work, eating leftovers, or skipping wants in exchange for needs.
- This can be a powerful lesson for your children in handling finances. You can bring them in on the work. Teach them about marketing schemes, and how they don't NEED that new rainbow colored sugar saturated cereal they saw on tv.
How to Use the Receipts to Inform Yourself and Your Budget:
- Decide how you will track your food costs. You can use plain old pencil and paper, a budgeting app (EZ shopping calculator, Smart Shopping List A La Carte, and Shopi are good ones), or a spreadsheet. I like the latter option. With the spreadsheet things get easier over time. It takes a while to enter everything at first, but if you are like me you usually buy the same core things at the store. When you add new items,you can quickly incorporate them into the list by alphabetizing them using your program's sort feature. (If you would like more information on this, comment below and I will create a tutorial on this.)
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| (This is Costco, which is why it seems so pricey. Remember these are bulk items.) |
2.If you choose to go the spreadsheet or pen and paper route there are simple steps you will need to follow. First, create the following categories: store, food item, price, on sale, and other. I like to keep my stores separate and to organize the food items alphabetically (again using that sort feature). I then use the "on sale" column to indicate whether or not the item was on sale, and the "other" column for notes. Once you have defined your categories, start listing your items and filling your chart in.
3. Great! Now you have a list of your items, and probably some insight into your spending. If you shop at more than one store you will need to add the totals together, so you can track your overall spending.
4. There's no set time in which you should do this, but you should definitely do it before you begin planning your meals and grocery list for the week. Once you put in the time to do the first list the rest is easy.
5. I like to keep my receipts filed in a binder for about a month, then I toss them. If you're not concerned with having to return anything, then toss them after you've entered them.
That's it! If you do this you will begin to empower yourself and control your food spending, which can be one of the greatest areas of waste in one's budget.
XOXO,
Riss
Questions, comments, concerns, suggestions, requests? Leave them below.
If you would like a copy of my the Excel file I created, email me at: missriss@hellanatural.com
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