Or Why Your Author Suspects There’s a Darn Good Reason That You Don’t See TV Ads Proclaiming, “Mutton! It’s What’s for Dinner!”
My whole reason for tackling The $1,000 Challenge was food. When my Detroit News colleague, the shy, teetotaling wallflower Charlie LeDuff, turned in a column where he described a guy selling raccoon roasts, it got me thinking. Had it come to this? Were people really showing up at the door of Glemie Dean Beasley, a licensed Detroit raccoon hunter, furrier, and meat salesman, and heading home with raccoon as an entrée?
The idea of eating raccoon was oddly intriguing, and it appealed to the gritty urban scavenger gene that I think all Detroiters inherit at birth. I tried to figure out exactly how I’d get Mrs. Funny Money to go for a raccoon roast. Beasley barbecues his with a vinegar brine and spices and says it tastes like mutton. I didn’t think I could sell her on that, since I don’t see a lot of TV ads touting, “Mutton! It’s what’s for dinner!” Maybe, I thought, I could dress it up in a fancy mustard sauce and shroud it in a French phrase, like cuisse de raton laveur à la Normande et son écrasée de pommes de terre. Or perhaps, with Detroit being so close to the Canadian border, I could whip up a French-Canadian inspired ragout, perhaps a fricassée de chat sauvage.
Alas, non. I couldn’t think of any scenario where I ended the meal saying, “And guess what, honey? It’s raccoon!” that didn’t involve Mrs. Funny Money rushing first to the bathroom and then to divorce court.
Fortunately, I was able to abandon the idea of serving up fricassee of furry bandit thanks to another language I was learning to speak. Rather than French, I took up the study of “couponish.” And the most useful word of all that I learned was “BOGO.” (It stands for “Buy One, Get One Free,” as they drop the F. It’s not to be confused with YOLO—“You Only Live Once”—which is the phrase youngsters use to excuse anything excessive or stupid these days. Such as chowing down on raccoon.)
Thanks to BOGO, as soon as I finish this paragraph I will sit down not to raccoon but to a toothsome bottom round roast that cost me exactly $0.00 per pound. The other roast that I bought to get this one free was $5.99 a pound on sale, so I ended up paying $3 a pound for both. Mr. Beasley’s $12 raccoon roast serves four, while the bottom roast serves two, which means the math works out against raccoon, at $3 a serving, and in favor of the round roast at $1.50 per plate. The only way raccoon would be a better deal were if the critter knocked on my back door, doffed his pelt, and climbed right into the oven on his own.
My introduction to lingo of supermarket savings came thanks to Teri Gault, founder of the Grocery Game, an online guide for combining coupons and store sales to produce sizable savings. Gault’s company surveys ten thousand items at major grocery chains each week to find which are at their lowest price and matches them up with available coupons for additional savings.
Her strategy relies on the fact that most items in the supermarket go on sale at some point every twelve weeks, down to their rock-bottom cost. Adding the coupons from newspaper inserts and signing up for mailers from the grocery store cuts the cost even more, occasionally even making some items free. When Teri took me shopping on a visit to Detroit, we scored two gallons of free milk by purchasing several boxes of cereal with a special coupon. By pulling out the coupons and stocking up whenever grits, Gatorade, or Glad bags were at their lowest prices, she explained, I could likely cut my already trim household grocery tab of $532 a month in half. The trick, she said, is to plan meals around the cheap stuff you’ve stocked up on instead of making a weekly menu first and then shopping to fill it in.
Doing the latter “puts people in a vicious cycle of paying full price for 70 to 80 percent of what they buy,” Gault said. Surveys of Grocery Game users, who pay $5 for the weekly guide, find the savings for a family of four averages $512 a month, she added. Partly that’s because she looks at all the savings on food that come with strategic grocery shopping that replaces fast food and any meals that are eaten out simply because there’s nothing in the house or no dinner has been planned.
The result is that you can enjoy some significant savings without eating like a pauper. The technique is pretty easy to pick up, and even if you don’t use Teri’s system, you can just start keeping an eye out for specials and sales. The bottom round roast, for example, I spied while popping into the store to pick up something for my mom. I recognized it as a previous good deal and snapped it up. Sure enough, when I checked, there it was on the weekly Grocery Game list marked in blue, Teri’s code for “invest,” indicating something you should stock up on—if you’ll eat it. This tends to fit in with my own philosophy of building systematic savings into the things and services you buy most frequently.
Taking a further look at the current list, I see red and yellow bell peppers on sale for $1 apiece. These are staples in our house, either for grilling with other vegetables in the summer, or, in winter, sautéed with onions, turkey meatballs, and the mouthwatering tomato sauce Mrs. Funny Money cans with our friend Cynthia. I had already purchased frozen ground turkey at a rock-bottom price at Costco a few months before and converted the first few pounds into a batch of spiced meatballs, which we split into two-serving batches in separate freezer bags. Now I can grab $2 worth of peppers and sauté them with the onions, olive oil, and garlic already at home. While that’s cooking I thaw the meatballs, throw half a jar of sauce in the pan, add the meatballs, and there’s a really good, really cheap main dish. I could add pasta to stretch it out (Teri lists Mueller’s Whole Grain at $1.17 this week, not a rock-bottom price, but good if you need it), but I usually just grab a manager’s special on a bagged salad mix and skip the carbs.
Another recent item on sale was whole cooked lobster, $5 each for some pretty small ones, 12 to 14 ounces. Generally I prefer a 2½-pounder with lemon and drawn butter, thank you, but for a Valentine’s weekend dinner, I grabbed three of the little guys, picked out the meat, and made a recipe of lobster stew with a pastry lid. That didn’t involve anything other than grabbing a leek and a lemon and using the staples at home (butter, spices), half-and-half (already on hand for Mrs. Funny Money’s morning coffee), and some leftover puff pastry stuck in the back of freezer. I added a salad and one of the fresh half-baguettes that go on sale at the local gourmet market after 4 p.m. for half price. At $20 (plus white wine, already on hand), it made for a slightly pricey dinner for two at home, but for a special weekend meal it was a heckuva lot cheaper than getting a sitter and going out.
The idea is that, whatever approach you use to shopping for food, if you stock your pantry and freezer with stuff you like when it’s cheap, you can plan your meals around what’s on hand and what’s cheap or fresh this week at the store, the farmers’ market, or even your own garden. And you don’t have to concentrate on packaged, processed stuff or eat things you don’t like just because they’re on sale this week. The downside is that it takes some planning, but you don’t need to shop every week other than to pick up dairy and vegetables. On those occasions, I will check the blue items on Teri’s list and try to grab a few. Sometimes I don’t even need to do that, since I now recognize the real bargains as they come around again.
I am much more lax about using coupons, mostly because I have wasted a lot of time on grocery coupons in the past. Most coupons I found were for items we didn’t use, and it turned out that even with 50 cents off, name-brand items often cost more than store brands. With the Grocery Game, I only need to keep two types of coupons, those that come in the mail and those from the Sunday paper. I don’t even clip them, but I just file them by date in a manila folder and pull them out when they’re called for. I usually forget, though, and just concentrate on the big sale items.
Freeing up cash
Once upon a time, when the newlywed Mr. and Mrs. Funny Money had two incomes and hadn’t sentenced ourselves to death by children, we made out a sort of menu, went shopping, and added whatever suited our fancy. Then we paid the bill because whatever it cost was what food costs, right? Hahahaha! It was a simpler time, and by that I mean we were idiots.
If you’re not putting any kind of thought into how you shop for groceries and plan your meals, your grocery bill is going to be the easiest place to score some big savings in your family budget. You don’t have to spend hours collecting coupons, run from store to store, or convert your garage into a giant walk-in pantry, either. Start, as always, with the items you use the most and look for ways to consistently find them cheaper.
One big payoff comes from nongrocery items, such as paper goods, sandwich bags, dishwasher soap, and so forth. I’ve found the best balance between price and quality at warehouse stores such as Costco, and in most cases the store brand works fine. Otherwise, at your grocery store, start with the cheapest stuff you can find and, if it’s not good enough, work up to the least expensive acceptable brand. I did this with paper towels, which are a major food group at our house, at least when I cook. I’d buy a cheap roll, take it home, and, when I unwrapped it, put the wrapper inside the cardboard tube. On the next shopping trip, I took the wrapper with me. If the towels had been lousy, I moved up to the next price level. If the towels worked fine, then I kept getting that brand.
The next step is switching to store brands and generics for packaged food. I have found no canned item, for example, where the store brand isn’t just as good as a nationally advertised brand. Also, most canned goods at our house, such as the diced tomatoes that go into Aunt Frannie’s chili, are used in recipes where spices and other ingredients are going to drown out any subtle difference between the national brand and a generic. In fact, except in rare cases (maybe a favorite pasta sauce, balsamic vinegar, or olive oil), I don’t think you’ll taste any difference when it comes to most things that are canned, packaged, or bottled. The only two things on earth where I insist on a specific brand are mayonnaise (Hellmann’s, and don’t you dare bring me any of that Miracle Whip stuff!) and Inglehoffer creamy horseradish. Since we maybe buy a jar of each twice a year, we’re not talking about big bucks here.
That’ll get you some savings right there, with no effort other than scanning the shelf to look for cheaper brands. When it comes to things like produce, dairy, and meat, you’ll need to check out the weekly store specials, manager’s specials, and fliers to see what’s on sale. Or you can use a tracking service, such as Grocery Game. Also, keep an eye out for price stickers and in-store promotions indicating that the store may be clearing out slow sellers. When you spy these items on sale, stock up. Once you become conscious of prices and consistently shop for the same items in the same stores, you’ll recognize that, say, 99 cents a pound for frozen turkey breast (especially the kind your wife likes) is a deal and that you should grab a couple for the freezer.
Another easy way to save on groceries is to see if your store has a loyalty program. Here in Michigan, grocery stores are big on everyday low prices—but only for customers with a store loyalty card. Then you get the specials, the ten-for-$1 promotions, and so on. The store managers don’t do this out of the goodness of their hearts, of course, but to keep you coming back and to tailor the inventory and specials to what they see you buying every time you swipe that loyalty card. But, every so often, we get a mailing out of the blue with customized coupons for things we tend to buy. That package also includes one or two customer appreciation coupons that offer $5 off any $50 grocery purchase or $2 off any $10 (excluding milk) from the dairy department. That, my friends, is free money, and you didn’t even have to print it yourself and face federal charges.
Yes, I said it—coupons. Okay, I know what you’re thinking: Brian, did you just say the “C word”? You’ve watched those TV specials and there is no way you are going to become one of those wacky coupon fanatics who fill the spare bedroom with bargain cat food to trade with their neighbors for oatmeal.
I remember the case of “Coupon Connie” from the early 1990s in south Florida. Connie became nationally known for being able to use coupons to the point that she’d walk out of a grocery store with an entire cart of free items, with the store refunding cash on top of it all. Connie was known to rummage through trash bins for box tops and product codes to redeem, but eventually she wound up being inadvertently snagged into a criminal operation that exchanged counterfeit coupons by mail. A federal judge gave Connie twenty-seven months in prison, even though he felt she hadn’t actually set out to break the law. (At the time I tried to convince my newspaper to use the headline “Coupon Connie Gets Clipped,” but the editors ignored me. But here it is, twenty-two years later, in my book, so put that in your ninety-day performance improvement plan, suckers!)
So, yes, I can see how it’s easy to get carried away with coupons, so we’ll hold off on that a bit. In the meantime, let’s talk about saving on groceries by doing more with what you get, whether it’s with a coupon or not. For the Funny Money family, real savings comes from cooking stuff once and using it for several meals. That bargain turkey breast I mentioned? First it got roasted for a nice Saturday family sit-down dinner. (Yes, we actually got two working parents and their child home at the same time, sitting down at the same table, and, most amazing of all, forgoing chicken nuggets and all eating the same thing. I have alerted The Guinness Book of World Records.)
The remaining turkey went for sandwiches, a reheated leftover dinner, and a last sandwich or two with canned soup when I worked late, and then the remaining carcass got stuffed into a slow cooker along with a bouquet of spices, onions, and whatever was getting ready turn in the vegetable bin. Mrs. Funny Money left that bubbling down for a day or so, and we had a big batch of lovely homemade turkey soup to eat and freeze. The original turkey cost less than $10 and yielded at least six meals. Ben Franklin wasn’t kidding when he called it a noble bird.
The same trick works with 2 pounds of flank steak on sale for $3.99 a pound. Two 12-ounce steaks get marinated and grilled for London broil, with one served for dinner and the other saved to top a Caesar salad later in the week. The remaining meat is cut up for beef stir-fry over brown rice. The fresh green beans on sale get used as a side dish for the first dinner, with some saved for the stir-fry later, too.
Substituting or skipping ingredients is another option. That flank steak in the grilled Caesar stands in for a rib eye. A fish dish with ginger, chiles, soy sauce, and sherry can call for red snapper all it wants, like some piscatorial Stanley Kowalski crying out for “Stella! Stella!,” but I’ve made it with tilapia, it works great with catfish and, if you’re in the right mood, the cheap, farm-raised salmon from Costco. The 99-cent package of manager’s special hamburger buns can stand in for toast and sandwich bread this week. And the crème fraîche that’s required for the lobster stew I mentioned earlier, at more than $5 for an 8-ounce container? That recipe is just fine without it (but don’t rat me out to The New York Times, okay?).
Put it all together and, when it comes to grocery shopping, this is the low-hanging fruit (ha!) that can save you a lot of money without a lot of effort.
Making ends meet
You are going to have to make your peace with using coupons and realize you can do it without becoming the kind of crazy cat lady who spends whole days collecting them, then ties up the entire checkout line while she fishes out a fistful of newspaper clippings, half of them expired, and then spends a half hour arguing with the checkout clerk before trying to pay with a double-endorsed, third-party, out-of-state check.
You can spend no more than hour a week planning your shopping, breeze through the checkout, and save hundreds of dollars a month. If you need any more motivation, consider this: The Lexus ES 350, according to reviewers at Edmunds.com, is a car “for buyers who put the highest priority on comfort and luxury,” with an overall level of opulence that offers “the utmost in refinement and relaxation.”
Why do I mention this vehicle? Because of my friend, Doreen Christensen, the consumer reporter at the south Florida Sun-Sentinel and a woman who treats paying full price for anything the way Superman approaches Kryptonite. Doreen has a new Lexus ES 350, and she’s paying for it with grocery coupons.
Doreen aims to cover her car payment each month with the money she saves by using coupons. In one impressive shopping excursion, she saved $450 on a cart stuffed with food and staples by combining coupons, store specials, and a little planning. As of March, she’d already saved enough to make the payments on her Lexus through September.
“People assume this is hard to do,” Doreen says. “Just try it, and when you see how much you save, you’ll be hooked. I’m not advocating stocking up a hundred bottles of syrup in your bedroom, but not using a dollar-off coupon would be like taking $1 and throwing it into the street.”
To claim big savings, Doreen says you just need to take five steps.
First, sign up for loyalty or preferred customer discounts at your favorite grocery store and get on the mailing list for the weekly store flyers or other specials. If there’s a rewards program that gives back money or discounts on gas, sign up for that, too. After all, gas and groceries are something most of us buy every week. For additional savings, look to see if your regular grocery store offers gas discounts with its loyalty card program, and look for online coupon offers that automatically work if you link them to your loyalty card.
If your store offers an e-coupon program that will send you coupons via e-mail or directly to your smartphone, sign up for that, too. I’ve added the Key Ring app to my smartphone, which stores my loyalty cards so that I can scan my phone screen at the checkout instead of cluttering up my key ring with a dozen of those annoying little pieces of plastic. The Key Ring app also automatically downloads special offers and exclusive coupons and links to weekly store flyers. CardStar is a similar app, and there’s also an iPhone-only app called Passbook.
The next item in the coupon toolbox, Doreen says, is to get two copies of the Sunday newspaper (remember: gum disease!). You’re only saving coupons for things you use, items that are free, and items that are buy one, get one free. The reason you want two of the newspaper coupons is because, hey, more coupons, and so you can combine them when you find a buy one, get one free (BOGO) sale at the store. Doreen explains, “If there are buy one, get one free sales you can use two manufacturer or store coupons, because you’re buying two items. That’s a very simple way to really double up your savings.” And if you have a BOGO coupon from the manufacturer and find a BOGO sale at the store, use the coupon and get both items for free, plus tax. (Coupon policies vary from store to store, but most allow this tactic.)
Third, gather additional coupons from a few select sources. That includes online coupon sites, such as Coupons.com and Smart Source.com. If your grocery store honors competitors’ coupons, either save inserts and flyers from other stores, or visit their Web sites, such as Target.com, for printable coupons. For more savings, search the Web for coupon match-up sites that pair your store’s weekly specials with current coupons. It takes a little research and you have to figure out the difference between a “catalina” (coupons printed at the checkout register) and a “blinkie” (a small electronic device in store aisles with blinking lights that prints coupons for a nearby item), but, again, you are looking only for items you use or huge sales on something you’d substitute for a preferred brand. The Grocery Game also offers coupon matching.
Fourth, go to the manufacturer’s Web site for brands you frequently buy, such as Kellogg’s or Procter & Gamble. Besides finding printable coupons at those sites, you also can register for coupons or sign up for samples of products or brands you frequently use, and get coupons or even free samples of new products, which also usually come with additional coupons.
Lastly, don’t forget social media. Going on Facebook to “like” your favorite brand or manufacturer also brings you additional coupons and samples. Sign up for freebies and special offers.
What you’re looking to do is find a couple of coupon sources that will consistently work for you without a lot of time and hassle, so don’t feel that you have to do this all at once. You can sample one or two match-up sites a week before you do your shopping instead of plowing through two dozen different sites on some kind of day-long extreme couponing bender. If you don’t weigh every possible purchase but just look for things you already use, it will help cut down on your coupon-hunting time.
Come grocery-shopping time, you’re looking to combine coupons with BOGOs or store specials. Or, if they’re offered in your area, shop on double-coupon days, when stores will give you twice the face value of a coupon, making an offer of 50 cents off worth $1. You’re also looking to combine or “stack” coupons, including competitor, store, and manufacturer coupons. Here’s an example from Doreen: Atkins frozen entrées are normally $3.99. She combined a manufacturer’s $1-off coupon with the store’s buy one, get one free sale, meaning her twelve entrées cost $12 instead of $48. That’s lunch for two weeks at $1 a day plus $36 toward her car payment.
Doreen estimates she spends about twenty minutes getting her list together and checking store flyers and coupons before shopping. At the store, I sometimes have to search to find a sale item, which is often in a separate display, or to see whether the generic is still cheaper than a name brand with a 50-cents-off coupon. But it pays off.
“I got to the grocery store at 2:30 and I got home at 4 and I won’t have to go back next week,” Doreen said of a recent trip. “I spent $99 and saved $127. That’s going to cover me for two weeks. Everything I bought was something I am going to use. By clipping coupons, I saved myself $127. I don’t want to hand over that money to the grocery store.”
Pinching pennies so hard that Lincoln gets a headache
The first step is to do the most with what you have. The Natural Resources Defense Council cites studies showing that American households waste $40 billion in food every year.1 About 20 percent of that comes from vegetables and 15 percent from fruit, and I’m not surprised. At our house, the vegetable bin in the refrigerator always seems to contain some withered scallions, mushrooms turning to just mush, or an apple that’s gone so bad it’s about to start dating Charlie Sheen.
One solution is to shop more frequently for things that will spoil, since I always seem to overestimate how many vegetables I will eat, or end up with a whole head of lettuce but then only use a few leaves for a sandwich. Instead of shopping for vegetables all at once with a big coupon-laden money-saving trip, trim the veggie list and then hit the store midweek to refresh the dairy and vegetables as needed.
This means you need to keep just a short list, hit the perimeter of the store, where the veggies and milk are, and avoid the center aisles full of expensive snacks, treats, and soda. This can be hard if you have one or more children in tow, as when you hit the grocery store after picking up the kids from school. Suddenly, you find the cart filled with Oreos, Goldfish crackers, juice boxes, and other must-haves for the kids, or you end up arguing with and dragging a bunch of sullen, grumbling children through the store. With Li’l Money, I take one of two tactics: He can choose one thing and one thing only (subject to my approval), and that’s it. Or I use this trick from my former editor, Mark “The Closer” Truby. If the grocery store is close to a dollar store, I tell the boy that if he helps me with the shopping and doesn’t whine, beg, plead, scream, or otherwise complain, he can buy anything in the dollar store. For a mere $1.06 (with sales tax), I get a quick, peaceful shopping trip and he gets to make the dollar store his oyster.
Another option is to build meals around not only what’s in your pantry but what’s getting ready to turn in the fridge. That soon-to-wilt leftover lettuce dictates that tonight’s dinner is a salad Niçoise, made with bargain tuna fish. Those fading zucchinis suggest a stir-fry, vegetable stock, or maybe some tasty but cheap zucchini latkes (the zucchini replaces the potatoes and it’s healthier. Add applesauce and some turkey sausages and you are living, pal.).
Of course, vegetables aren’t the only leftovers. My mom, raised during the Depression, would occasionally declare, “It’s must-go-down night.” That meant that a backlog of small portions of leftovers, dated produce, or meat was piling up in the fridge and was going to be disposed of through us, her loving family, not the InSinkErator. We’d pick from the smorgasbord of leftovers, with maybe a vegetable or side of mashed potatoes thrown in, and the world didn’t come to an end just because we weren’t all eating exactly the same thing.
Naturally, anything you can grow in your garden is nearly free, and things such as carrots, tomatoes, zucchini, beans of any type, and squash are pretty easy to cultivate. We grew three kinds of lettuce as well as some herbs in the Funny Money kitchen garden last year, and we had better salads than we could’ve bought for next to nothing all summer. My paternal grandfather, Frank O’Connor Sr., who raised ten kids during the Depression, rotated green beans, pole beans, and wax beans through his garden for the whole summer. There was one late July week that my brother and I stayed with Frank and Grandma Clara at the lake and I thought we were going to turn into beans.
Farmers’ markets and food co-ops are other options to stretch a food budget, but they also demand that you adapt your menus to use what’s cheap and in season. The way to really enjoy seasonal ingredients is to check out the recipes in your newspaper, or go online and find stories from places with really good food sections. My coworker Kate Lawson, The Detroit News food editor, comes up with dandy stuff over at DetroitNews.com every Thursday, and the City Kitchen column on The New York Times Web site always has something in season and terrific. If, for example, you see a nice bag of littleneck clams on sale at Costco, as I did recently, the City Kitchen recipe for clams and pasta is more than just the thing.2
Also, don’t overlook U-pick farms, especially if you’re into canning. Whether it’s apples or blueberries, these kinds of outings can provide an afternoon’s worth of outdoor activity as well. When my parents visited us in Florida during strawberry season, my mother and I spent one of our most memorable afternoons picking fresh strawberries and winter tomatoes at a place out on State Road 7. We hit the deli on the way home, which had just marked down a fresh batch of buffalo mozzarella. That evening we had a memorable meal that started with insalata Caprese and ended with strawberries and whipped cream over fresh drop biscuits. It might have been cheap, but it tasted like a million bucks.
Another low-cost option is to stretch what you’re cooking. I first learned this technique from my Sarah Lawrence College pal Laurie Lytel, who is now Nevada’s finest family therapist. Laurie bought frozen orange juice and, instead of adding three cans of water, threw in four. Voilà—one more day of juice for free! Extend that technique by adding more rice, vegetables, or noodles to turn a recipe that serves six into one that serves eight. I routinely double up the amount of tomatoes and onions in my chili and any ground beef casserole, and the extra vitamin C and fiber goes does us all good. And for real bargain recipes (plus many more tips, coupon links, and more) I like to scan 5dollardinners.com, which even offers a weekly meal planner. Make a double batch and freeze the leftovers.
Of course, if you are in a dire situation you should absolutely take advantage of any food assistance programs you can find. Right now, we have more people on food stamps in this country than on unemployment, so don’t hesitate to see if you qualify, even if you’ve got a job. Also look for food pantries in your area by checking with United Way and local social service agencies and churches.
If you want to go really hard-core to save on food, you can raise rabbits or chickens, but consider the hassle, neighbors, zoning laws, and your own squeamishness. Dolly Freed’s very interesting book Possum Living details her experience living on next to no income, in part by relying on a steady supply of home-raised rabbit meat.3 In her informative and entertaining Make the Bread, Buy the Butter, Jennifer Reese gives details and recipes based on her own experience after losing a job and deciding to find out just when homemade beats store-bought, and vice versa.4 Once you’ve made your own guacamole you’ll never go back—and you’ll save money. Just make sure you don’t spend it all on beer when you invite your friends over to sample your killer guac.
The Bottom Line
Goal: $1,000
Week 1—Transportation . . . $41.61
Week 2—Miscellaneous . . . $132.89
Week 3—Utilities . . . $139.39
Week 4—Kid Costs . . . $114.50
Week 5—Work Expenses . . . $90
Week 6—Personal Spending . . . $104
Week 7—Entertainment . . . $108
Week 8—Life Insurance . . . $64.40
Week 9—Groceries . . . $37.23
Total monthly savings . . . $832.02
Left to cut . . . $167.98
According to my budget, living expenses ate up to 10 percent of our family income, and two-thirds of that was groceries. But trying to shrink the grocery bill showed that saving on food was going to come in nibbles, not big bites, leaving me far short of the week’s $100 goal.
I found the Grocery Game easy to use. It took about a half hour of planning, as well as some tromping around the store to find the sale items. But our savings after four weeks weren’t very dramatic—$37.23 for the month, though we added a lot of items to the freezer and pantry. As Gault noted, savings at the start are low until Grocery Game users go through a full cycle of savings.
We’d already been cutting back on food and other supermarket sundries, buying paper goods in bulk at a warehouse club, splurging on premium steaks only when they were on a big sale, and switching mostly to store brands and generics for everything else.
“It doesn’t surprise me that you’re not saving a lot yet, because you were already a good saver,” Gault said. “What you’re doing is amassing things you’ll use beyond the next twelve weeks. After that, your needs are basically just your produce and milk and replenishing your investments.”
That’s encouraging, and I had talked to one Metro Detroiter who did, indeed, slash her supermarket spending by 50 percent with the Grocery Game. But at the moment my attempt at cutting the food budget left a bitter taste in my mouth. It also left $167.98 in savings I had to find in my last category: housing.
Forget raccoon. It looked like I was going to end up eating crow.