How to Save Money on Grocery Shopping in 5 Simple Steps

1. Set a budget

The first thing you need to do is set a budget. Set it at $100 per person in your family. If you have five people in your family, your budget is $500. We are a family of four, so $100 per person in our family is $400 per month.

2. Clear your cupboards and fridge

The next thing you want to do is going to be a game changer.

You want to go into your cupboards, fridge, and freezer and get rid of everything that has expired or gone bad or is just about to expire. 

This is the organizational step. You're going to get a visual idea of what you have to work with. 

Have you ever gone to the store and thought, I need these ingredients? You wonder - do I have sugar at home? I can't remember if I have sugar at home. So you buy the sugar, and then you get home and have ten bags of sugar already. When you are organized, you save money. This is for every aspect of your life, not just grocery shopping. 

3. Reuse and reduce

You want to be able to reuse as much as possible. Let me give you a couple of examples—like pickle juice. In our house, I reuse pickle juice as much as possible.

Some peppers and onions were about to go bad, and I popped them in this pickle juice. So now we have pickled peppers and onions that are amazing on salads or on sandwiches. 

I save all my vegetable scraps and throw them in the freezer (like the top of the onions). Then what you can do with this is when the bag gets big enough is to boil it for vegetable broth. I probably have 100 different examples of how I reuse things in my kitchen. 

The other way you can reduce your amount of waste is by freezing things. I have a handy dandy freezer chart that tells me how long things will be good for in the freezer.

It lists things that you never thought you could freeze. Like lunch meat or milk. Reusing all these things leads to a reduced amount of waste. 

4. Extend the life of food items

You have to extend the life of everything that you have. One way we do this is I have one of these gadgets in my refrigerator. What this does is it extends the life of fruits and vegetables. 

There's also a vinegar water rinse (recipe in the photo above) you can do on your fruits and vegetables that does not make them taste or smell like vinegar, but it makes them last way longer. 

Again, there are hundreds of ways to extend the life of all of your food. 

5. Simplify

All you need to do is simplify your meals. Don't go out and buy all those weird ingredients that you're only going to use once, and then sit in your refrigerator and rot.

We simplify our meals like this. Every single Monday is the same dinner. Every single Tuesday, the same dinner. And so on 'for every Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. 

Every day gets its own meal until we can't stand it any longer. You may think that sounds super boring but just stick with me. Monday is Mexican Monday. So we only have Mexican food on Monday.

Think about it; most Mexican foods have the same four or five ingredients. So when I go grocery shopping, I need the same ingredients every Monday, even though I can change the meals. 

Tuesday is soup and salad day. Again, think about it. Most soups have the same exact ingredients in different portions. 

These are basically what's called food formulas. 

What happens when you simplify your meals and your grocery shopping? One, it takes way less time, and two costs way less money. All I do now is look into my pantry. What don't I have?

Then I simply go into my Instacart and look at where it says previously bought, and then I just add to my cart the things that we don't have, and it's basically the same list every week. I also only go grocery shopping every two to three weeks. 

How to save money grocery shopping

I promise you that if you follow the steps above, you will save money on grocery shopping every month, and it will beat the cost of inflation. What tips do you use that are helping you cut your grocery bill? Share your tips and tricks in the comments below.