Groceries Without the Games

What's the Grocery Game

If you've been to a couple of personal finance blogs you've probably heard of "The Grocery Store Game". If not, here's a story on it over at Get Rich Slowly. The idea is that you combine coupons in such a way that you get most of your groceries and toiletries for very little cost.

It's Hard Work

Frankly, it seems like a lot of work. You have to go through all the store fliers each week, find the best coupon deals, find the manufacturer's coupons that match with the fliers coupons, etc. Oh. Then you have to drive to each of the different grocery stores and get all those deals, figure out what meals you can make with whatever products you may have been able to get for cheap.

As noted in the comments of the story over at GRS, most of the goods are actually toiletries or unhealthy foods. For me, I don't think it's worth the work.

Saving 14.5% On Groceries With (almost) No Work

As you'll see below, I save 14.5% on groceries before coupons even enter in to the equation. The process I use depends on the store having the two programs I use in place, so my process may not work for you.

Of course, playing the grocery game depends on you having the right big-chain stores in your area anyways, so I think this is a viable alternative for many people who could play the grocery store game.

Full Sheet : http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pFOJsib3bG6Gbi-GWZVFXRA

Here are the factors that let us save 14.5% whenever we get groceries:

• Grocery Gift Cards
  • Our grocery store sells gift cards which give you a 10% bonus. Eg. Buy a $300 gift card, get a $330 gift card. We bought $1200 of cards five weeks ago.


• Buy the Gift Card on your cash-back Credit Card
  • We get 1% on our Credit Card purchases. That's $12 back on our $1200 purchase


• 5% Student Discount Card
  • The grocery store has a special student affiliate card which gives you 5% off your purchase beyond the normal affiliate card price. My wife is still a student, so I don't think this is dishonest in the least.

Affiliate Card Price Caveat

The grocery store we go to doesn't always have the best overall prices, however when using the affiliate card the prices are competitive with other stores in the area. For this reason, I do not include the "mark down" that the affiliate card gives us. That mark down is only present because they mark the prices up for anyone who doesn't have the card.

Downsides

1) Be sure that the grocery store you do this at is one that you like, otherwise you get stuck with $1200+ of gift cards locked up in the one store.

2) It's easier to be spendy if you're spending gift-card money than real money.

3) You have to put down a large chunk of money right at the start. If the 10% bonus is going to be an ongoing thing, we will buy the smallest denomination possible, and leave the rest of the money in our ING account to further stretch our grocery money.

Real Life

Between May 9th and June 16th we bought $306.94 worth of groceries for a cost of $265.08. Considering that we had agreed to increase our grocery spending (we did) and decrease our eating out (we did!) we are about where we expected to be for grocery spending for the month.

Other

I have no idea where the extra $41.86 I saved went. Probably into my ING account...

Good Books In the Home

When I was a kid I liked to read. I would read almost anything I could get my hands on from Medical text books to Shakespeare to Alistair MacLean. I would peruse the local library, but most of the books I read were ones I found at home.



I've often wished that my parents would have had more classics on the shelves. The classics that are sited time and time again by professors, by lecturers and by insightful people everywhere.

While I don't yet know if my kids are going to be voracious readers, I've decided that I am going to at least make it possible for them to be if they so choose. In that vein, I've been stopping at the local thrift store every month or so and picking up any classics I come across. They are usually priced $0.50 or $1 for a paperback, $2 to $4 for a hardback. The average price comes out to about $1.00 per book.

JD over at the Get Rich Slowly blog is usually against buying more books than you will actually read, but I see these as an investment. If having lots of good books around increases the chance that my children will enjoy culture and a love reading, I'll make that investment and take the risk.

And just maybe I'll learn to enjoy reading again.

Finding a House

A Newbies Guide to Not Understanding Buying a House

How do you go about buying a house? There's so much data out there that it's difficult to find information.

We would like to move and buy a house in January of next year. As we've started looking at housing, we've realized that there are a ton of things that real estate websites assume you already know. Unfortunately, we don't know them, and we're getting a crash course.

Our problem is made worse by the fact that some thing real estate sites think we should care about, we don't. For example, they want to know exactly what city you want to live in and have finely divided price ranges for searching.

We just want to move to a specific region of the country. Google says the area we would be happy moving to is a roughly 420 mile diameter circle. We're also pretty flexible on price. For the right house on the right lot we'd be happy to pay $300,000, but we've also seen $60,000 houses that we like just fine (in different cities).

These and other factors are making house searching a slightly cumbersome project! Below are some of the issues we've come across while house hunting.

Things We Don't (or didn't) Know

• How many square feet do we need? What does 2000 sq. feet mean? How big is that *really*? Some pictures of rooms and houses and their square footages would help us get in the ballpark here.
• How big is an acre? This lot has .2 arces. So what? City slickers like us don't uses acres till we're trying to buy land, so we have no notion of how big an acre is!
• What are the requirements for a First Time Homebuyer's loan?
  
• First Time Homebuyer programs have different limits on salary and housing cost based on the city or neighborhood the house is located in.
  
• Is it possible to buy a house in a neighborhood with a HOA (Home Owner's Association) and not join. (I hate all the rules...)
• How do we find jobs near the houses we like?
  

Things We Wish We Could Do

• Search for homes that would fall under the max first time homebuyer's program values
• Show homes in neighborhoods/cities where I would qualify for a first time homebuyer loan
• Filter houses by areas with HOAs
• Show homes for sale on a map with the local schools, parks and other features highlighted
• Find the prices for other similar houses nearby and in other neighborhoods
  
• Have links to the local chamber of commerce or city business listing websites next to houses

There's a lot more, and a general sense of being overwhelmed. I'm sure we'll find our way through the haze, but it'd be nice if there was more digestible information available online.

If any real estate company sees this post, please feel free to implement any and all ideas. I'd love to be your customer if you did.