Shopping Around

Airborne1

My money saving tip is not earth shattering and may not be possible for people with limited time or live in an area with a limited choice of supermarkets, however it really does save me quite a lot of money in the long run.

We all tend to buy some items on a regular basis. The trick is to identify those that are often "on offer" and to only ever buy at the offer price.

For example, my family like diet Pepsi or diet Coke (yes I know there are cheaper colas, but I have yet to find one that they all like !). Anyway the "normal" price is £1.85 for 2litre (actually it is now only 1,75 litre for Coke, so we now rarely buy that), but these are often discounted at 2 for 1 or £1 per bottle. The trouble is that such offers "move around" between supermarkets (e.g. Tesco this week, Sainsburys the next, Morrisons quite often and so on).

So I have a simple rule. The maximum we pay for these drinks is £1 per bottle. If the supermarket we are in is charging more, we do not buy and check at the next one. The same applies for tubs of margarine (particularly if your not to fussy over make), jams, biscuits and so on.

Just have a max price and if above that, move on. It works for all items with a reasonable shelf life and if you have good self-discipline, you can save a lot !

sarah1972

Why not just use mysupermarket? You will then know in advance what supermarkets to go to.

DCFC79

Cheaper alternative is to drink tap water.

sarah1972

DCFC79 wrote: »

Cheaper alternative is to drink tap water.

And healthier

Petula

To be fair, it was being used as an 'example'.

Agree though, that MySupermarket is good, and I also use I Spy Prices (.com) all of the time.

Stevie_Palimo

We all like to save money but shopping in the way the OP describes surely factoring in the time and effort plus additional transport costs would probably outweigh any savings made, I think if you are really trying to budget then as above look at the sites that are designed to save the pennies for you, I still think that unless it was a huge saving the same rule applies by traveling from one to another.

I know I certainly do not have time to look about for stuff and am pretty lazy in that respect by shopping with two places alone for groceries and general household items, I only tend to look at costs when purchasing larger items like electrical and so on.