Reserve groceries

In Mary Hunt's book "Live Your Life for Half the Price", she says there are two types of grocery shopping: needs and reserves. Either people shop for only what they need at the time and buy just enough food to last until the next shopping trip, or they study grocery store circulars and stock up their reserves on items as they come on sale. She is a big promoter of the "reserves" method and says you can end up saving lots of money if you shop this way. The hard part is switching from "needs" shopping to "reserves" shopping. She estimates it will take about 3 months to build up your reserves enough to be able to essentially "shop" from your own pantry when you prepare meals.

With the help of a free site like Coupon Mom, you can look up major grocery store chains to see what is coming up on sale that week. Then you can look up which manufacturer coupons will appear in the Sunday paper, then match the two up for the lowest rock-bottom prices on grocery items. Those are the ones to stock up on. If you can find a store that will double coupons, you will save even more and sometimes even get an item for free!

I am willing to give this a try since I am still having trouble cutting the grocery bill to where I want it to be. The problem is, there are no major grocery store chains near us and I don't like driving to Berryville just to shop at Wal-Mart. But we do have two big local grocery stores that compete weekly for business, so between those two, I should be able to get good deals if I only buy what's on sale and stock up on those items.