Price List

Sorry it's been so long since I've blogged. The weekend was crazy, but now I'm back and ready to put my nose to the grind stone!

I decided that I would go grocery shopping myself rather than letting Jason do it -- mainly because he was working and wouldn't have seen the baby that night if he'd gone after work. Besides, I'm a grown woman. I should be able to do this!!!

I didn't rock it out like I'd wanted to do, but I didn't do badly either. I did it in budget, so that's a plus. However, the whole point is to SAVE some money... preferably a lot of money! Truthfully, though, the sales just weren't there last week.

My grand total at Wal-Mart was $170 and some change. I spent $5 at CVS. That's $175 -- so, under our $180 budget, but not by much!

Now, I'm not beating myself up too much about the total that I spent. As long as we're under budget, I consider it a job well done. There is a part of this shopping trip that I am totally regretting, however. The end of it was very stressful -- very, very stressful. I wrote down all my prices as I put things into the cart, taking off coupons, of course. Near the end, I added everything up to see where I was. Well, as it turned out, I was startlingly close to budget mark and I still had things on my list. Important things.

So what happened? I panicked. I began trying to "think on my feet," which has never really been a strength of mine. I'm a planner. To make a long story shorter, I decided I could do without an essential. I was wrong.

I had ground chuck on my list. In my haste and panic, I couldn't remember all the meals ground chuck was supposed to be in. I thought I was just going to put it in spaghetti sauce and hot dog chili. I opted to go vegetarian on the spaghetti and substitute a can of pre-made chili for the ground chuck. That was a great plan -- had I not been planning on making swedish meatballs. It is extremely hard to make meatballs without meat. We won't starve, of course, but I was disappointed in myself. (I substituted deer meat for the meatballs and the meal was still awesome.)

Why was I disappointed? Because I could have saved myself the stress! I highly, HIGHLY recommend that you keep a price list of some sort. That is something that I have gotten away from in the past couple of years and it is something that I am going to definitely start doing again - immediately!

Why a price list? Is it really necessary? Yes, if you're on a budget (unless you have a photographic memory, I suppose) and yes, if you want to get the absolute best deals on your staples.

You don't need to make a special trip to the store to compile your list if you're one of those people that keep your receipts. Just go through your receipts and write down those things that you buy every - or almost every - time and the price of them. Your price list will come in handy two ways.

1. You can know what you're going to spend on your basics each week (or two weeks). Chances are good that you buy the same basics every time you go. Pretty much everyone has to have toilet paper, paper towels, milk, bread, cheese, etc. I'd say between 50-75% of what you buy at the store are staple ingredients. So, if you know how much these things cost, you know what most of your grocery list is going to cost. There's no surprise about that part of the shopping trip.

2. If you see a sale in the Sunday paper on something that you always buy -- like cheddar cheese slices, for instance, what are the odds that you're going to remember exactly what you pay for that item? If it's something you've been buying for years, chances are good that you don't even pay attention anymore. So how are you going to know if it's really a good sale? If you have the normal price written down, you'll know and you won't have to feel stupid going to the store the next time only to discover that the "sale" price you gave for the cheese was more than you normally paid for it.

So, making a price list is my next project and I hope you'll do it with me. I promise you, it will be worth it in the long run. It doesn't matter if you do it on paper, on the computer, or wherever else you can come up with. I prefer a spreadsheet on the computer because you can search for specific items later, but you do what makes you happy!

In the next few days, I'm going to be pouring over this week's sales papers and coupons and working up some deals! As soon as I get some worked up, I'll be posting them! If you work any up, comment away!