One of the most basic but important elements of good financial management is identifying opportunities to cut back on your spending. When it comes to regular outgoings, one of the areas you’ll be able to look at is your grocery shopping. Now, you might hear that and think you spend well in the supermarket, or that you don’t want to sacrifice the quality of your meals for the sake of your budget. But spending less on your food doesn’t necessarily mean you have to compromise on quality.
Instead, you can look at your behaviours, your spending habits and the products you target to create a quality shopping list on a reduced budget. Take a look at the ideas below and see if any could make a difference to your financial management and improve the state of your bank balance.
Buy own-brand
Do people care as much about brands anymore? Perhaps they shouldn’t. Sure, you still want your Heinz baked beans and HP Sauce, but when it comes to the bulk of your weekly shop, going own-brand over named is a great way to save money without a drop-off in quality. Just look at the rise of a supermarket like Aldi in the past 10 or 20 years. Once much maligned for offering low-grade food at cheap prices, the Aldi brand has grown to represent a host of quality in-house products still priced below many of their competitors.
Because of this, the interest in creating better own-brand ranges has grown among supermarkets as it offers customers the chance to cut their spending without too much hassle.
Plan your meals and portions
A lot of good financial behaviours come down to planning and acting early. Whether that’s booking cheaper tickets for travel well in advance, getting to a sale before the rush or planning out your meals, thinking ahead makes a big difference. Where the latter is concerned, cooking meals en masse and creating numerous portions from one culinary venture is not only a time saver, but is cost-efficient as well.
Portioning out your food means you won’t overeat, which will help your groceries go further. Planning your meals will help you understand what you do and don’t need from your weekly shop. Between the time and cost benefits, it’s a simple way to make a few life improvements in one go.
Capitalise on deals
Talking of those big sales and the early bird catching the worm, there’s always someone, somewhere, looking to get your business. Whether that’s a 50% off voucher you’ve been sent for a takeaway via Uber Eats or focusing solely on the 2-for-1 deals on your weekly shop, going after discounted products is another easy way to keep your spending down and maximise the quality of your shop.
Sure, you’ll need to flexible on the products you buy and the timing of when you want to treat yourself, but you’ll see a significant difference in your outgoings.
Adopt a zero-waste approach
The aforementioned meal planning and portioning goes a long way to helping with eliminating waste from your shop. You can also make a point of ensuring nothing you’ve bought goes to waste by regularly keeping tabs on what food you have in and what you can do with it. Adopting zero-waste behaviours means you’ll be doing the environment a favour as well as your personal finances.
There you have it, nothing ground breaking – just simple practices that could save you a small fortune every month without sacrificing any tasty meals.
