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Groceries

Budgeting

6 Tips on How to Drastically Cut Your Grocery Bill

Posted on November 19, 2019

Cut Your Grocery Bill and Save Money with these 6 tips!

If your grocery budget is getting completely out of hand, it might be time to reconsider your grocery shopping habits.

You may not realise how big your monthly grocery budget is if you haven’t sat down to crunch the numbers. You might think you are only spending a small amount only to find you are blowing $1000 a month on food! If you are a large family, that might be a necessity, but if you are a smaller household, and you waste a lot of food, that is some serious cashing going down the drain! Not to mention the environmental cost of all that food going to landfill.

If you want to save some serious cash in your budget, a great place to start is with your grocery bill! And that best thing is, adjusting this area pays weekly dividends – every time you shop!

Check out 6 Tips on How to Drastically Cut Your Grocery Bill, without feeling like you’re missing out on the good stuff!

6 Tips on How to Drastically Cut Your Grocery Bill

1. Meal Planning

Meal Planning was one of the first habits I implemented in order to cut my grocery bill. If you haven’t given Meal Planning a go I urge you to start today! I am not kidding when I say this, for me learning how to Meal Plan was a huge game changer. I went from stressing over what to cook every meal, and spending more money on groceries than we needed to, to buying just what we needed and knowing in advance what we needed to prepare, take out of the freezer and cook. A nice bonus for this Zero Waste enthusiast was that we also reduced our food waste.

When we stopped buying more than we needed to eat in a week we saw the savings instantly. And the greatest part is those savings are in our bank account every week!

And it does take a little getting used to, as all new habits do, but once you are in a routine it becomes as normal as brushing your dishes! Make sure you set yourself one day a week (or whatever suits you!) to dedicate time to meal planning. For more tips on how to get started Meal Planning check them out here. And you can grab Your Weekly Meal Planner Printable from my store to get you started. You can even laminate it and write on it with white board marker to reuse!

2. Changing my stockpiling ways

Like your average shopper, I too, used to stockpile groceries. I remember one day my husband and I came home to unpack the groceries only to find we’d grabbed another two cans of corn when we already had 4 in the cupboard. I must say this was about the time I knew something had to change.

After discovering mininalism and decluttering over 50% of our stuff, I was keen to minimise the excess stuff we had to store in our kitchen, bathroom and laundry cabinets. Everything in our home was under review! Even the cans of corn.

In order to further cut my grocery bill, I began to only shop for what I needed for the week ahead. If I had enough dish washing tablets to last me until my next shop, I didn’t put them on my list. If I ran our of washing powder, I knew that I could easily grab some on my lunch break at the shops if I was really that desperate, or just wait for the weekend when I did my weekly shop.

Eventually I got used to buying things Just in time and realised that I didn’t need to keep so much on hand. This might not be ideal for you if you live rurally, or you have a large family, but for my family of 2 it worked perfectly for us and can be adapted to your needs! The key is to not buy in excess and don’t just fall for those sale signs! Be rational! If you have 6 months worth of dish washing liquid and you’ve got more bottles in your hands, put them down!

3. Taking notice of how often we needed things

Have you ever seen something on sale and proceeded to buy what you might not realise was a year or two years supply? It might surprise you to know that you probably have done this at least once, more than likely many, many times.

For me, I used to pick up a new lip balm or hand lotion every other shopping trip. And when deodorant or conditioner was on sale I’d grab a whole bunch of those as well. When I started decluttering our home, it became extremely obvious as I worked my way around our home how much of these items I had stockpiled. And so, I made myself use them up before buying anymore. The funny thing about this was it took me a good 1-2 years before I needed to buy a single lip balm or hand lotion. It really opened my eyes to how long your stuff lasts and how infrequently you need to buy them!

One toothpaste can last you a good six months. One can of deodorant for three. And eye shadow palette can last you 1-2 years. So the next time you run out and buying your favourite toiletries and beauty products, take a second and consider if you have just bought a years supply and if you really need to buy that all today or if 2 would be enough until the next sale. Be rational! If you have 6 months worth of dish washing liquid at home and you’ve got more bottles in your hands, put them down! They aren’t going anyway from that stores shelf and will be there when you need them next time!

4. Sticking to the brands we loved

As I decluttered our home, I realised a lot of the stuff I wanted to throw out were items bought on impulse. Something new I saw in the store that I bought to try, only to realise I didn’t like the product at all, and after one or two uses, it would sit in the back of the cupboard unused as a reminder of why I shouldn’t impulse buy. You may not realise it, but these little ‘nagging’ bottles and the like, can really get to you. Particularly if they are getting in the way of you trying to reach things you do need.

And so I decided to ensure that in future we would just buy what we loved. It was okay to spend more on something we would love and that added value to our lives.

And I know what you are thinking? But the more expensive stuff I love, is going to cost me more, not save me money – right? As I mentioned above, after realising how long our beauty and other products lasted it really didn’t cost us more to buy these things as we stopped wasting our money on things that we didn’t love or need. We made sure to only buy what we loved, and what we needed, when we needed it. At most we would keep one or two spare items in one small container, we had designated for back up stock. That’s it. And by buying what we knew we would love and use, we saved money on buying random new items that were only going to end up in the bin.

5. Only Grocery Shop With a Shopping List

If you are hitting the supermarket with no list, you are more than likely throwing away hundreds of dollars of your hard earned cash every month. By making a rule, that you will only shop for groceries with a list in hand you can save yourself time and money. Armed with your list you can walk past the beauty aisle, knowing perfectly well that you already have shampoo in your bathroom vanity, or that you have plenty of mince in the freezer and don’t need to grab more. This helped us reduce impulse purchases in store and will help you cut your grocery bill.

If foundation or that bag of chips isn’t on the list, you shouldn’t be in the make up or chip aisle! This is a great method to help you set boundaries and resist the temptation of impulse buys. And I think we can all use any help we can get when it comes to our shopping cruxes!

We also made a habit of writing out our shopping list as we went, so as the coffee or milk ran out, it went on our shopping list, ready to grab before we hit the shops. Make sure you put it in an easy to see place like your fridge, so your family can add to it as things run out.

6. Do regular Fridge, Freezer and Pantry reviews

If you are shopping ‘blind’, that is, without even checking what you have in your house before you leave for the grocery store you are doing it backwards! Before you run out the door, give your pantry, fridge and freezer a once over and see what you do and do not need to replenish. This will only take you five minutes, but can save you from coming home with groceries that you do not need. Not to mention your sanity, so you don’t have to have a disorganised and overflowing pantry!

Have a think about what you need to use up in these spaces before it goes out of date. Ask yourself, do you have excess pasta you need to use up, or some frozen pizzas you need to clear out of the freezer, and plan your meals around those.

For more Tips on how to save money with your Grocery Budget check out 15 Tips to Reduce Food Waste and 10 Easy Tips to Save Money on Your Groceries Budget

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

This weeks comment question: How did you cut your grocery bill? I would love to know what strategies you have implemented for your family and what worked for you!

If you found value in this post I would be super appreciative if you could share it with others who might also find value in it 🙂

Budgeting

15 Tips to Reduce Food Waste and Save Money

Posted on May 28, 2019

When I first moved out of home, I thought I had everything worked out. I could vacuum by age twelve and washed my own clothes by fourteen. And thanks to that, but the time I moved out, into my very first home at 24 but I was adulting reasonably well.

Notwithstanding that, after a few years of living out of home in my mid twentys, it became pretty evident that my husband and I were binning an unbelievable amount of food (and money!) every week.

Every Sunday, our bin collection day, came the ritual. I would open up our fridge and proceed to empty it of anything that had gone out of date or that had gone bad. Some days I would have 2-3 bags of food waste. It was all being composted by our local council, but that really wasn’t the point!

We were wasting time shopping for items we didn’t need.

My Sunday was being eaten up clearing out said fridge of our excess food, time that of course, could be better spent doing anything but clearing out our fridge accumulations. We were wasted money on food we weren’t eating and were literally throwing our money down the drain. And most importantly we were being environmentally wasteful. Perfectly good food was going in the bin because we were too time poor to cook it and often ended up just grabbing KFC on the way home instead.

Once the realisation of the level of all round waste sunk in, and the acknowledgement of the invisible money we had been throwing straight into our bin, I became extremely interested in researching the correct way to store and prolong the life of food.

Over the next couple of years I picked up heaps of tips and tricks that have helped us to Reduce Food Waste and Save Money that I am going to share with you below in the hope that it too, will help you. This list is not exhaustive, and there are many more for the different foods you consume in your household, but these are the ones that have helped me the most.

Let’s get to it, here are 15 Tips to Reduce Food Waste and Save Money

15 Tips to Reduce Food Waste and Save Money

Shop ‘Just In Time’

Start Meal Plannning and reduce food waste and save money all at the same time without much effort! Check your calendar and shop for the meals you plan to eat at home, so you don’t end up buying more than you need. When you are more intentional with your grocery shop, not only can you reduce what ends up in your waste bin, but there are huge dollar savings to be had. Check out My Beginner’s Guide to Meal Planning here for more tips on how to shop intentionally for groceries.

nd something that isn’t touched on much, there is an awesome satisfaction to having just enough and using up what you do have. Give it a go and let me know if you found the same! 🙂

Capsicum

Throw your capsicum in a plastic bag when you get home to make them last a good 2-3 weeks. Normally if you leave them out in the open they will start to spoil around the 5-7 day mark. Alternatively slice them up and freeze them to use on a home-made pizza or stir fry.

Basil

I like to buy Basil plants from the local supermarket and throw them in a glass and water them each day, leaving it on my kitchen windowsill where they can get some sunlight. This usually extends the life to 2-3 weeks rather than the ones in packaging which seems to die a couple of days after they enter your fridge.

Before this I was spending $3 or more a week on basil, which seemed to always go bad when I needed it for a meal. I now can get away with spending $3 once every three weeks or as I need it.

Of course if you have a green thumb, please do grow your own, but I have tried and failed at growing it outside, but if you can you are amazing! :))

Fresh Herbs

Reduce food waste and save money by wrapping your herbs in dry paper towel, just a thin layer underneath and on top and store your herbs in a container. We’ve done this with Coriander and it helps extend the life to at least 7 days Vs just leaving the Coriander in a container and watching it wilt in a matter of days.

Alternatively you can freeze your herbs in ice cube containers with oil to use when cooking.

Chillies

We used to buy and bin red chillies too frequently. It was a ridiculous waste of food and money so I learnt from our extremely knowledgeable Mother In Law that you can easily freeze Chillies. Simply throw them into your freezer in the container or bag they come in and they’ll keep for months! When you are ready to use them, simply grab them out of the freezer and slice and they will defrost in your pan.

Spinach/Rocket leaves

Another food managed to reduce food waste and save money with was spinach/rocket salad leafs. We often ended up buying more than we needed and wasting the excess until we figured out there was an easy and less wasteful way to extend the life of your Spinach or Rocket.

Like with the Herbs, mentioned earlier, if you store your Spinach or Rocket in an airtight container lined with paper towel on the top of bottom, this will draw out any moisture from the leaves, keeping them fresher for longer. This can give you extra time to enjoy your salad and save you on those costly salad bags!

Want to Save More Money? Check out the 52 Week Savings Challenge

Carrots

This is a super new tip I learnt to reduce food waste and save money and another easy one. I cannot tell you how many times we grabbed a kilo bag of Carrots from Aldi (as they only sell them in bulk) when we only needed 3 or 4 carrots for a soup. We’d soon forget about said Carrots and before we knew it they were bad and needed to be binned.

If this has been you up to this point, here’s an easy tip to reduce food waste and save money with your carrots..

Put all of your carrots into a large cup filled with water in the fridge. And just change out the water every 2-3 days to keep them fresh. This will make them last around 2-3 weeks! And of course you can always dice them and freeze any excess, or slice them and have them as a snack with your favourite dip!

Bread

This is a pretty obvious one but one that can’t be forgotten. Freeze all your bread products! It’s just my husband and I so we don’t get through even a loaf a week but always like to have bread handy, so we got into the habit a long time ago of freezing everything: Crumpets, English Muffins, Bread, Wraps, Pizza Bases – you name it!

It doesn’t work so ideal for things you want to eat fresh, but for anything you plan to toast or put in the oven – it works a charm! Simply chuck in the microwave for 30-40 seconds and then toast away! And a great thing to utilise if you want to stock up on bread when it’s on sale!

Bananas

Another tip to reduce food waste and save money is to, take your browning bananas and chuck them in your freezer for later use with baking or use them up straightaway to make your favourite Banana baked treats! My fave being banana bread. You can also use them for making Banana Ice Cream or keep them for smoothies or milkshakes!

And if you want to enjoy them for longer, simply wrap the tops of the stems firmly with cling wrap or slow down the ripening process by storing them in the fridge until the day you are ready to eat them!

Onions

Have you ever chopped half an onion and not known what to do with the rest? Me too! An easy tip to reduce food waste and save money is to slice any left over onions and freeze them in a resealable sandwich bag. They won’t be ideal for using them fresh, but are great to throw in a curry, stir fry or on a pizza.

Spring Onions & Leeks

I often find that I always have more spring onion than I need for my meal. Reduce waste and save money by chopping the base of the spring onion leaving about 10cm and drop the roots into a glass of water. Over the next 7 or so days you’ll have a new bunch of spring onions sprout. And surely a fun experiment for the kids!

This also works for Leaks but so far it has been less successful! I have found that around this point the base gets a bit too moist, so after this I throw it into our compost bin. But you should get two for the price of one this way 😉

With the spring onions, slice them up and freeze what you don’t need to use immediately in a zip lock back. Simply shake out the contents into your soup or stir fry when you need them and squeeze out the air in your bag when returning them to the freezer.

Tomato Paste

If your recipe calls for 3 tablespoons of tomato paste don’t feel you need to just throw it back in the fridge, ending up with that gross mould that seems to find it’s way into the jar before you bin the jar. Divvy what’s left into an ice cube tray and store in a sandwich bag when they are frozen blocks. Pop out however many you need when you are cooking.

If you do plan to use your remaining paste in the next week or so, store the jar upside down to stop that mildew from forming inside the jar. (Just be careful not to leave if for too long as ours exploded and we had sauce everywhere ‘;))

Eggs

If your eggs are out of date, reduce food waste and save money by testing your eggs before you throw them out. Wonder How To: Food Hacks suggests you fill a bowl with cold water and put the eggs inside. If they sink to the bottom they are fresh, if they float they are past their prime so go ahead and bin those. Rather than just binning ours the day they go over the use by date, we now do a quick check on them!

Berries & Grapes

Another way to reduce food waste and save money is to freeze your Berries and Grapes. Taste.com recommends layering them on an oven tray to freeze and then storing them in airtight containers. The Grapes make a great frozen, healthy snack and the berries can be added to fruit smoothies!

Celery

If you can’t quite eat a whole bunch of celery in the time it takes to go bad, try this tip from Clean My Space to reduce food waste and save money. Wrap your celery tightly in foil to keep it fresh for up to two weeks! I’ve just tested this and happy to say it certainly works! Alternatively you can dice it up and freeze it ready to use in your next batch of soup! With celery at $3-4 a bunch it’s a great way to save!

And there you have it guys, 15 Tips to Reduce Food Waste and Save Money!

This Week’s Comment Question: What do you do at home to prolong the life of you food and save money on groceries? Let me know in the comments below!

For more helpful tips to reduce food waste and save money check out:
10 Easy Tips To Save Money On your Groceries Budget and 6 Tips to Drastically Cut Your Grocery Bill!

[Photo by: Elena Koycheva @ unsplash.com]

If you found value in this post I would be super appreciative if you could share it with others who might also find value in it 🙂

Organising

A Beginner’s Guide to Meal Planning

Posted on April 23, 2018

I used to be one of those people that couldn’t seem to get myself organised in the kitchen and failed miserably at any kind of meal planning.

We would go shopping whenever we got around to it, usually once a fortnight, and walk out with $200 or more of groceries for two people and still end up ordering more take-out than we felt we should. We had our grocery list, but there was no real plan in place which meant we often ended up buying a lot of things on impulse once we hit the stores.

The end result was that our pantry, fridge, and freezer were always overflowing. Our disorganisation was costing us big on our grocery budget. We rarely had a complete meal planned out and dinner was a stressful event. We found ourselves constantly wasting food at the end of the week that we didn’t get around to eating, along with it our money.

After watching War on Waste and seeing the level of food waste in Australia, I wanted to do more to reduce our household waste. I hated how much food and time we were wasting and wanted to take the stress out of mealtime and save on our grocery budget. I was determined to give meal planning another go with my newfound motivation.

How I got started meal planning

I tried to keep the process as simple and quick as possible. I wanted to be able to do our meal planning as close to on autopilot as possible. Here’s what I did:

Grabbed an old recipe folder I had tried to use in the past and removed any recipes that I didn’t want
Organised my recipe folder by category: Vegetarian meals, Soups/Side Dishes, Pizza/pasta, Meat dishes, and Desserts so everything was easy to find
Photocopied some new recipes from my recipe books and added them to the folder
Made a master list of about 15 recipe ideas that we loved and had cooked before and listed under the title every ingredient we would need to make that meal. I also included vegetarian versions of recipes for my husband so we could cook the same, or at least similar meals more often.

Keep It Simple

I couldn’t believe the first time we did our meal plan with my newly prepared recipe folder it only took five minutes! Over the weeks I learned what did and didn’t work and came up with some techniques to keep us on track without meal planning goals. Instead of getting stressed over what three meals a day we’d make, we kept it simple.

We made easy things for breakfast like toast, cereal, or had yogurt.
For lunch, we brought our leftovers to work, which once we started cooking at home leftovers seemed to be in abundance.
For dinner, we would cook on the nights we were home and if we were extra prepared, we would make double and save ourselves cooking an extra night the next day.

Of course, we still ate out and bought our lunch occasionally, but we felt so much more organised with our meal planning than we had previously and didn’t feel the need to run and get takeaway. We were prepared.

Beginners Guide to Meal Planning

If you want to try our meal planning for yourself and your family, check out these 5 simple steps:

Step 1. Decide on the meal plan frequency

Decide what planning schedule is most convenient for your family. Do you like to buy in bulk and do a big shop once a month or are you more of a take-it-in small chunks kind of planner? Set your meal plan to weekly, fortnightly, or monthly – whatever suits your pay cycle or shopping preference.

Step 2. Check your schedule

Use this printable, a whiteboard, notebook, or anything else to write down what days you will and won’t be at home to eat for the week ahead. Put a cross on the days you will be out of the house.

Step 3. Assess your meal options

Go through your pantry, fridge, and freezer and check what food you have to work with and what meals you can make from them. If there is something you bought a while back and it is close to expiring put that option on your meal plan now. Check your recipe folder or books for meal ideas for some inspiration.

Pick your meal ideas and write them on the days that you need to cook. Here is a Weekly Meal Planner Printable you can print out and use. Be sure to consider what days you need something easy and quick and what days you might have the time to put on the slow cooker or prepare something a little more time-consuming and plan your meals accordingly. Don’t forget to check your local grocery store catalogs for current specials to save you money.

4. Write your shopping list

Armed with your meals list, check each day and write out a shopping list of what you need to buy to make up those meals. Recheck your pantry, fridge, and freezer to see what you need to get from the shops and leave out anything you already have at home. You are only buying the ingredients to fill in the gaps in your recipe. Don’t forget to be creative and think outside the box. If you don’t have mince in the freezer maybe you can make some vegetarian tacos this time instead.

And most importantly, only buy what you need for your allocated meal period, if it is a week only buy food to use up over the next 7 days. If you do end up buying extra because some items were on special, make sure you use them up in the next week’s meal plan and spend less on next week’s budget.

5. Stick to your shopping routine

Make a new habit of shopping for your list on the same day. It might be every Thursday night or every second Sunday afternoon. Try to stick to a routine with your shopping so you know exactly what you need to shop for and when. Avoiding hitting the shops multiple times a week will save you on unnecessary purchases.

Start saving money today with your Weekly Meal Planner Printable!

Meal Planning Tips:

Here are some extra meal planning tips that will help you on the way!

• Include your family in the meal planning process. There is nothing worse than planning a meal only for everyone to complain about it on the day, after all your effort planning, shopping and cooking. Perhaps you can give everyone a choice once a week of what they’d like on the menu to keep everyone happy.
• Put a reminder in your phone for when you do your meal planning so you don’t forget to do it.
• Keep a master list of recipes and ingredients close to your kitchen or office so you can quickly glance at the ingredients for your favorite meals when making your shopping list and avoid forgetting anything!
• Keep your meal plan in sight, such as on the fridge or your command center so everyone can see it. This will also avoid the ‘what’s for dinner’ question every day 😉
• Avoid overcomplicating your meal plan. Don’t feel like you have to plan a month in advance, just stick to a week if that is easier for you. Stick to 10-15 simple recipes that you can cook on a rotation and save the new or more time-consuming meals for special occasions or times when you have the energy and motivation to cook something more exciting.

This week’s question: Do you meal plan at home? What tips do you have to make the process even simpler? Please share your tips and tricks in the comments below 🙂

If you found value in this post I would be super appreciative if you could share it with others who might also find value in it 🙂

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