SAVE BIG

Groceries are our fourth largest expense, even though it can feel like you don’t have much to show for all that money. The grocery category includes food, personal care products, and household supplies. Groceries cost an average of $10,692 a year for a family of four, according to the IRS. It makes perfect sense. We need food to live, and some would say we can’t survive without deodorant and dishwasher soap, either!

The usual advice to save on food is to pack your own lunch. Yawn . . . Yes, that will save you about $7 a day, but it’s a pain. When I pack my lunch and take it to work, my body goes into some sort of freak starvation mode and I inevitably wolf down my sack lunch at 11 A.M. Then I’m famished again at 3 P.M. and end up going out and buying another lunch. I soon get tired of packing a limp lunch and buying a late lunch and I give up. Besides, that’s Small Stuff Savings.

By contrast, my four Guerrilla Grocery Shopping weapons will have you paying pennies on the dollar for your groceries. You could choose any one tactic and cut your bills significantly. Layer them together and you’ll do even better. How much better? I will demonstrate $21,051 worth of grocery savings here in Part IV. If you wanted to achieve the BIG SAVINGS I ring up in the coming chapters, you would have to pack your lunch every workday for the next 12 years!

Surprised that groceries can bring such BIG SAVINGS? They can—and the great thing about them is that they are universal. Not everybody owns a house or a car, but we all have to eat and bathe and do laundry. And if we can learn to do those little things for less, we’ll be able to afford the big things. If you are struggling with my advice to buy a house ASAP and pay cash for your car, this is the part of the book that will make it possible.

• Chapter 22: The first Guerrilla Grocery Shopping weapon is price matching, where you find a store that will match other stores’ sale prices so you don’t have to run all over town to bag bargains. This trick of knowing where to shop can save you 45 percent.

• Chapter 23: Stockpiling is the second weapon in the Guerrilla Grocery arsenal and it means stocking up on groceries when they’re deeply discounted instead of buying them as you need them. Just by knowing when to buy and then stocking up, you can save more than 50 percent.

• Chapter 24: Knowing how to shop is Guerrilla Grocery weapon number three: Creative Couponing. The key here is never to use a coupon by itself. Instead pull off Coupon Combos, where you layer different discounts on top of each other and you can save 80 percent—even get many groceries for free. Yes, free.

• Chapter 25: In the final grocery chapter, I share my wild card weapons for Guerrilla Grocery Shopping, from forming a grocery buying club to bidding for groceries at a grocery auction. If my BIGGEST, best advice is still too time-consuming for you, then fast forward to the end of the grocery section where I share the Not-Shopping method, which requires you to do nothing. Literally nothing—yet it can still save you up to 24 percent!