Saving at the Grocery Store

by Natalie
(Hooper, UT, USA)

One of the biggest ways that I save money for my family is at the grocery store.

I have noticed throughout the years that if I plan a menu for a week before I go grocery shopping, I cut my grocery bill by at least 50%. I also use coupons like crazy.


As a family we save money by trying to keep entertainment costs at a minimum. We frequent the library almost weekly where you can check out books, games, movies and cd's for free. It's even free to get the membership!

We spend a lot of summer evenings at the park having a picnic, which is fun, cheap and gives my kids a chance to be outside.

We love to watch movies as a family and were spending about $25/month on movie rentals. We decided to give Netflix a try. It's $9.00/month for unlimited rentals and a lot of the movies are available to instantly stream to your T.V. Now we have no television channels (another &75.00/month savings after we canceled our cable service) and unlimited movies for only $9.00/month!

Diapers are always a big expense when there're infants in the home. I have three children and I have learned that most of the store brand diapers work just as well as the national brands but can cost half as much.

I have always been a working mother (medical bills to pay), so I half breast-fed and half formula-fed all of my kids. When I had my 2nd child, he was born with a group B strep infection and was in the intensive care for a couple of weeks.

We got a monster medical bill and were trying to save money anywhere possible. Previously, I had been against store brand formula, but at this time I looked at the nutritional value and compared them to the national brands. The nutritional value is just as good if not better than the national brands but literally costs 60% less. We saved a lot of money buying the store brand formula.