Ah, normalcy. In the past 2 weeks, Super Doubles came to a close, there were 2 birthdays in my household, lots of doctors appointments and assorted other weirdness. It is good to be back.
I mentioned in a previous post my rules for stockpiling. I've also talked a bit about how I shop.
If you're a shop for the week shopper, you need some place to start.
First, you should consider meal planning. I, personally, fail at this for a number of reasons, many of which are outside my control. If you're a new convert of the stock up and save cult, you'll really want to give this a try. As a lifelong stockpiler, I do a pretty good job of anticipating what my family will eat or want prepared and keep enough around to keep everyone happy without a meal plan.
First, what does your family eat regularly. Write it down. Figure out how much of what you consume in an average week or month. Maybe you do Tuesday pasta night and use 2 lbs of pasta a large jar of sauce. Maybe you make meatloaf twice a month and buy 2.5 lbs of ground beef for that. Over the course of the average week maybe you open 9 cans of veggies. Whatever it is your family eats, and eats on a semiregular basis, write it down, both the meal and the ingredients. Make absolutely sure you include your go-to recipes.
I'm a fan of spreadsheets, but you can do it on paper. Take your list of ingredients, and select 10-20 that you use most frequently. Also list things your family eats regularly that may not be an ingredient, like cereal. Grab the sale fliers for this week, and flip through.
When you find an item on your list in the sale flier, next to that item, write down the price you'll pay both before and after coupons, the unit size, the sale date (keep it simple, just pick the start date of the sale week), and the name of the store with the best deal. Your price book is born! Gather your sale ads weekly and repeat this process, updating with the best price you find on your items to get a good feel for how things are priced at stores in your area. As time goes on, add items to your price book. You don't want to start by tracking 100 items, that's too daunting a task. As time goes on, you may eventually want to track that many, but start small with the items you buy most frequently and then expand from there.
The best deal isn't always the jumbo package. The best deal is the item with the lowest unit cost. This is why you start off by jotting down the price and the unit size. For example, let's say you're pricing your favorite cereal. Normally, the 20 oz box is $5 and the 12 oz box is $3.50. 5/20= .25 and 3.50/12= .292, so normally the larger box has a lower unit cost and is a better deal. But you have a coupon for 75 cents off one box, 11 oz or greater, and your store doubles 75 cent coupons, so your coupon is worth $1.50 off a box. Now the big box is (5-1.50)/20= .175 per ounce and the small box is (3.50-1.50)/12= .167 per ounce. The small box is the better deal this week.
With your price book in hand, you can go to the store every week and see if the price on the shelf is a good deal or not. Sales cycle every 3-4 months, so after a while you'll find the rock bottom pricing on the items in your price book. Everytime you find a better price, you should make a note of it in your price book. After a while, you'll be able to glance at your price book and know that it's about time for an item category to go on sale at a stock up price, and you can plan accordingly.
Once you know what is and what isn't a good deal, you can begin stocking up. A stockpile is like a house, you build it one piece at a time. The longer you stockpile, the larger it can become. The more items and the more quantity in your stockpile, the longer you can hold out for a good deal. Ideally you will get enough stock in what your family uses when it's at rock bottom pricing to bridge to the next rock bottom sale. It won't happen overnight, but it will happen.
Now, back to that meal plan. You've written down meals your family eats regularly, made a list of items needed for those meals, and started a price book.
Let's say, in an average week, your family spends $35 on meat and usually eats chicken for dinner twice. You pick up the sale flier, and chicken is on sale BOGO. You can buy twice as much chicken as you usually do for the same money. If you do nothing to change what your family eats this week, you just buy extra chicken and add it to the freezer, you're ahead. You haven't spent any more money, and you've added to your stockpile. Next week when the chicken isn't on sale, you don't have to buy it. You can spend your grocery dollar on something else that is on sale and add it to your stockpile.
If, however, you decide to make chicken 3 times this week instead of 2, and pass on the full price ground beef you'd be making into meatloaf, you can stretch your grocery dollar even further and add more chicken to your stockpile for the same money or spend less this week on groceries without actually adding to your stock. If money is tight, I recommend meeting in the middle, buying a little extra for your stock and adding it to your meal plan, that way you see a reduction in your grocery bill right now and have added a little to your stock so that next week you don't have to pay full price for chicken. The money that is freed in next weeks budget that would have gone to buying chicken can be spent increasing your stock on what is on sale that week.
It's a wonderfully vicious cycle. Once you get a good stock going of items your family regularly consumes, you get to stand back and marvel that people pay more than $1 for a box of cereal and over 50 cents for a jar of peanut butter ever.
Getting a stockpile built takes time. You won't get every good deal, and you should never beat yourself up because you got what you thought was a good deal last week (and last week it was the best deal you could find) only to find the same item cheaper this week. I beat myself up once, early on, for having "wasted" a coupon so I could get toothpaste for 24 cents only to find it was free with that same coupon the next week. I was new at couponing, and 24 cents for a tube of toothpaste was an amazing deal to me at that point. The longer you stockpile, the lower your buy price will be. Before couponing, I wouldn't dream of paying more than $2 for a box of cereal, now I won't pay more than $1, and even at $1 I'm not happy about it. I know that soon enough it will be 50 cents, or even free. There's actually a deal this week near me for free cereal, and if you "buy" 3 or more boxes of the free cereal you get a catalina coupon for a free gallon of milk. :D
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