Online Supermarket Versus Coles And Woolworths

There Are Always Cheaper Ways To Do Things

Every Saturday, Renee and I would treat ourselves to a sausage roll and soft drink at our local bakery. A harmless treat to end the week we thought. Now this treat was costing us $10.90 total. We are not talking sheep stations.

However it struck me one day as I was buying the soft drink. A 600ml bottle was costing us $2.95 from the bakery. But we can buy whole 1.25 litre bottles of soft drink for a $1.50 in our shopping. OK this was a wake up call. Now we have started purchasing the 1.25 litre bottle from the supermarket and keeping it there until the Saturday, saving us a grand total of $4.40. And bringing down our weekend treat to $6.50.

OK we have found a way to get this snack cheaper but then something else hit me. Why don’t we also buy the sausage rolls frozen from the supermarket? The same sized sausage rolls at the supermarket cost us only $1.90 vs $2.50. Now we were saving a grand total of $5.60. This continued for a couple of weeks as I kicked myself for not coming up with it years ago.

But Renee then had a brainwave. How about if she purchased the ingredients to make our own sausage rolls during the week? She would freeze them and then we could have them on the weekend.

Now we have worked out a price to buy all the ingredients for the sausage rolls. It now only costs us per roll a total of $1.25. And our grand total savings per week compared to when we went to our bakery is $6.90. Or a total of 37 percent. Had we been doing this for the past three years we could have saved ourselves around $1076.

Finally for the good news; the homemade sausage rolls taste just as good as the bakery sausage rolls. So as good as you might be doing right now, there are always places to cut money from your spending.

Don’t Just Write A Shopping List; Write A Cheap Shopping List

The importance of a shopping list is second to none, if you want to save money on food. However even the best-written list can miss out on a lot of the savings to be had if you are choosing expensive meals.

For example, no matter how cheap you get your meat to cook a roast there is no way it can be cheaper than 2-minute noodles. Of course, you don’t want to have 2-minute noodles every night. But if you could plan your meals for the whole week in advance, maybe you can tweak your list to include some cheaper meals.

So what we are talking about is coming up with a meal plan list. We do this in our household and it adds thousands to the bottom line each year. Just by being able to see what we are going to cook seven days in advance, you can quickly see if your tastebuds are craving expensive meals which will break the budget, or if there are cheap meals which will add dollars to your bank account.

But we are firm believers you need to know where you have come from to understand where you are going. The best way we have found to evaluate your future meals (and by meals, we are talking about dinner) is for one month write down everything your family eats. For example:

Monday November 1^st: Tuna Mornay

Tuesday November 2^nd: Roast Lamb

Wednesday November 3^rd: Takeaway McDonalds

Thursday November 4^th: Homemade Soup.

You continue this for the whole month then you can really and truly evaluate your spending patterns. Ask yourself some important questions like: Are we spending too much on our meals? Do we have a taste for the high life? Does every meal use expensive meat compared to vegetables?

Now at the start of the following month you can write out a meal planner for the next 7 days. Compare what you are planning, to what you had in this seven-day period previously. If you have less expensive meals, that is great. You are on the right track to save money. You can do this a week in advance for the rest of the year.

To truly give you an idea of why this is so important, we looked at 4 expensive meals vs 4 cheap meals. The following ten meals all are from ingredients bought at the supermarket. We have priced them using the recent prices of the ingredients we used in the meals. For example, if the recipe calls for a tablespoon of sugar, we have worked out what the one-tablespoon is worth.

The expensive meals are:
Roast Chicken and Potatoes
Roast Pork
T Bone Steak
Lamb Chops The Cheap meals are:

Chicken Soup
Minestrone Soup
Sausages In Gravy
Cauliflower Soup
Chicken Curry

Would you belive per serve the cost difference is a average of 77%.

From the above example you should be able to tell why cheaper meals are so important. Now you don’t have to live like a vegetarian monk just to save money. However, if you can find a few cheaper meals to slot into your weekly budget, you will be on the fast track for saving in no time.

How Would You Like To Save 10 Percent Plus At The Supermarket?

When my wife and I say we want to save money, we mean it. We take examples of saving money from anywhere we can. This one we have never read, however to say you can save a lot is an understatement. While it’s not the easiest way to add dollars to the bank account it does work. Plus this one had been right under our nose for years but we didn’t pick up on it.

Every Saturday, like a lot of Australians, we hit the supermarket. One week we do a big shop and the next week we do a smaller one to cover the things we have run out of. We go together to spend time with each other, get some exercise and argue about what brands we like or don’t like.

Then one day it struck me. We are both going to the shopping centre which has two supermarkets. What about if we split up and took two grocery lists of the same products. My wife goes to one and I go to the other one. We do our shopping for everything on the list separately, getting and looking for the best prices. Then call each other and run through the items one by one and put back whichever item has the more expensive price!

So we tried it. Wow, what an eye opener! Do you know we saved 18.97 percent from our two picks? This means, over the course of the year we could save around this 18.97 percent off our total shopping bill.

And there is little downside to this:
We are both using the same car, no extra fuel.
When we call each others mobiles to check prices, we are both on the same network, so the phone call’s free.
We both use debit cards and hit credit on the machine so the transaction is free.
The only downside is we don’t get to spend any time together at the supermarket.
But the savings are well worth it.

Imagine saving 18.97% percent on your yearly shopping bill. Spend $3000 and your saving would be $570. Spend $5000 and your saving would be $949. Spend $15,000 and your saving would be $2846.

However, this is not as easy as it seems. Working out the total saving can be confusing.You need to come up with a special list not to get confused. We did it by using an Excel spreadsheet, however any bit of paper will do. Here are the list of six headings you will need to fill out for each product you place in your trolley.

The headings are:
List (name of the item)
Quantity (how many we need)
Aisle (which aisle it comes from, this is handy if your product is not the cheapest and you have to put it back, you don’t want to be running around the supermarket looking for the right spot)
Price (The total cost of the item)
Measurement (For example litres, kilograms, or grams of the item)
Per measurement (This is now advertised on shopping tickets by law, how much per litre, how much per gram even how much per 100 sheets of toilet paper. As this is by law, the reading from your partner’s per measurement should be the same in their supermarket)

Here is an example of mine filled out:

You do this list set out like this to stay organised. Now once we have finished picking up the shopping and the list is completed, we call each other. Renee would have an identical list but with different prices and information.

Then the conversation will go like this:

Renee: “OK what do you have for canned chopped tomatoes?”
Adam : “$2.00 per kilo.”
Renee: “OK, I have $1.80 per kilo.Right you put yours back. What do you have for tomato sauce? I have 0.48 cents per 100 mls.”
Adam: “Well, I have 0.35 cents per 100 mls. You put yours back.”

This conversation continues until you have ticked off all the ones you will put back. But because you have written the aisle number next to each product, it’s easy to find where they go.

Now pay for your products and meet your partner at a designated meeting area. You could go one step further when you get home by adding up the difference between the winning prices and losing ones and seeing how much you saved to the last dollar. Or you could just feel great by knowing you get the best possible deal each and every time you go shopping.

We plan to carry this on throughout the year and see how much we can save. We will report back to you this time next year with our findings.