Shopping for groceries can be an overwhelming experience whether you are feeding a whole family or just yourself. Being one of the major household expenditures, grocery shopping undeniably hits hard on your paycheck. However, when it comes to saving money on the groceries, not only you have to become a savvy shopper at the store, but also turn into a smart individual around the kitchen. To help you save money on the groceries while still enjoying the cuisines you love to savor, here are some of the premium money-saving tips that will help you plan your shopping:

Fix a Budget and Adhere to It

When it comes to cutting down your grocery bill, the first and the foremost thing that you need to do is craft a budget especially for your food bills on a monthly basis. After all, you cannot expect to save money or reduce costs on your groceries without having a clear goal in mind. The simplest and the most convenient way to sketch out your grocery budget is to save a handful weeks’ worth of receipts and calculate how much you generally spend on an average. Once you get an exact number, reduce 10 percent from that amount and see whether you can stick to that reduced amount or not. If you can easily achieve that, you can go further and shrink your budget even more.

Prepare a List and Shop Carefully

Once you fix your budget for shopping, it is important to craft a list before visiting the stores. Impulse shopping will not only consume more time than usual, but it will also result in higher expenses. Apart from making a list, you must also pay attention to the schedule you are planning to proceed further with your shopping in order to avoid buying more unnecessarily.

Try Shopping from Multiple Stores

Shopping from different stores is the key to saving quick money while paying less for groceries. Even though most people try to avoid this undertaking, as they find hopping various stores a bit time-consuming. You have to be strategic and when there is a requirement, seek out the best deals and discounts in the stores located close to you and then select the ones that will help you in saving most for the week.

Using Coupons and Discounts

While it might seem on the surface that leveraging coupons take a lot of time, they are indeed worth the time for clipping, printing out and most likely load to a store card. Put it this way – if you are simply using five coupons worth $1 per week on products that you have purchased anyway, you will be saving more than $250 annually.

Watch Out for Alternative Stores and Try Amazon

Do not walk past a different grocery store in your neighborhood or a dented-can store without browsing the items available there. Some of the ethnic and neighborhood groceries sometimes offer excellent deals on produce and meat while the dented-can shops and even drugstores can provide good discounts on packaged and canned items. Apart from that, you can also leverage the services of Amazon that often offer steep price drops on canned foods, cereal and various pantry items.

Take Part in Meatless Mondays

Meat is undoubtedly one of the most expensive items for most households and if you are habituated with having meat at every dinner, try opting for meatless Mondays once a week or any other day to see how much you are saving on it. You might find the need of adding Steak-free Saturday and Tofu Tuesday to your eating regime as well.

Avoid Wasting Food

You might not be accountable for controlling and managing the amount of food that is being wasted at the farms and the grocery stores, but you definitely can ensure putting a cease to food wastage at your own home space. This can be easily done by using the ingredients before they go stale and by not putting an excessive amount of food on your plate. One useful trick is to prepare a weekly meal of a stew or soup that you can utilize as a catch-all for all the ingredients used all over the week.

Finally, you can make some economical substitutions such as replacing out of season veggies with some cheap cabbage and carrots while buying fresh berries for frozen ones. Adhere to the aforementioned tips and you can ensure saving a good amount of money on your groceries without much hassle.