
Do you find your home is filled with so many household consumables that you forget what you have and end up buying more just to make sure you have it in or because it’s on sale?
I love getting a bargain, while grocery shopping the other day I made a whooping saving from buying items that were heavily reduced. My bill showed I’d made a 30% saving!
The trick is, these were all items I needed and it got me thinking of how much I manage to save by being organised.
The saving not only comes from managing to get items when they are reduced in price but also not having a pantry full of out of date items and laundry cupboards brimming with so much stuff we can’t find what we need.
The first step is to organise like-minded items together as we need to know what we have.
Then the system is simple:
- Work out the shelf life of an item in your household (so let’s say it’s toothpaste and you go through one a fortnight)
- Going on the assumption that most items go on sale at least once a month
- When your supplies get down to two, you add it to your shopping list
- During the weekly shop, check out the item to see if it’s on sale. If it’s not, leave it on the shopping list until next time
- If it is on sale, please don’t overstock. If you use 2 a month, perhaps buy 4.
It can take a little bit of working out to begin with but once you have the numbers right and form the habit it’s easy.
And it doesn’t need to be so regimented, for our household I’ve worked out that for most non-food consumable items I only need one spare, when I open something new I put it on the shopping list and usually manage to get it on sale.
For items that come in bulk, like dog biscuits, marking the container to show when it needs to go on the shopping list is effective.
I would love to hear your money saving tricks.
Don’t delay, start today
Sara