Organizing for Savings
By Lea Schneider, Professional Organizer

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Lea Schneider is a member of the National Association of Professional Organizers and the Association of Food Journalists.

Lee provides hands-on organizing and organizational consulting through her company, Organize Right Now, at www.organizerightnow.com, and her favorite project is the kitchen.

Organizing for Savings
Check out all of Lea Schneider's helpful home and kitchen columns at Organize Right Now.

It’s enough to make you cry over that spilt milk!

We are experiencing the worst round of food inflation since the 1990s, according to recent Associated Press reporting. Rising prices in packaging the food and getting it to your neighborhood market, in connection with rising cost of raw ingredients, are starting to strain the family budget.

I tend to measure by the cart-load. It seems that I would often have enough bags for two carts to the car. Now I spend the same amount and it easily fits in one cart.

If you are also finding it hard to make ends meet, putting your organizational skills to work can help. Organizing isn’t just closets and cabinets. It is also encompasses planning and time. It takes some of that time and planning to stretch those grocery shopping dollars.

Break out your planning skills and use them to hunt for a bargain. To get the most bang for your buck, you can no longer just go to the closest market and picking up everything you need. It may be efficient but it might also be costly.

Think of stores, outside your normal grocery chains, which may offer better prices. You will find fresher and better priced produce at local farm stands. We buy a ton of things with our food money that we don’t eat, from hairspray to laundry detergent. Many of those things are cheaper in dollar or discount stores.

Here are some tips to help organize for savings.

• The more times you run into a store, the more you spend. Make a menu and then shop for a week or two of meals.
   

• Use newspaper ads to develop the meal ideas. Concentrate on making meals out of the items featured on the cover of the advertising circular. Those featured items, such as chicken quarters or ground beef, are the biggest sales break of the week. Avoid pre-packaged or already prepared foods. This is the time to break out your recipe collection.
   

• Divide your list into sections: fresh produce, personal hygiene items, cleaning supplies, canned goods, and baked goods.
   

• Stop at the local farm stand for produce. If you are not sure where to find one in your area, contact your county extension agency.
   

• Check your phone book for a bread outlet. Almost every town has an outlet store for the local bakery. Stop there for bread items. If you find a great sale, remember those items freeze well.
   

• Take your list to a discount or dollar-type store and investigate their stock and prices. I’ve found that one chain of dollar-type store carries all the paper goods, cleaning supplies, personal hygiene items at a much more reduced rate than the grocery store. In addition, they have a selection of dry goods and I can typically pick up cereal, cake mix and canned goods for less money.
   

• Finish up your list at the grocery store. Don’t feel loyalty to one store. Shop where that week's advertised deals appeal to you. Keep in mind the cost of gas. I wouldn’t suggest driving miles and miles to save 10 cents per pound on chicken.

When at the store:

• Try to purchase extra of the advertised specials. That is sometimes hard to do on a budget. Even if you just purchase extras of one or two sale items, it will help in the long run. You will eventually have a well-stocked pantry purchased at sale prices.
   

• As you get practiced in stocking up on bargains, begin your menu planning by checking to see what you have on hand that can be used in a meal.
   

• Unless there is a great sale on a name-brand, stick to store brands.
   

• Carry a calculator. Watch the price per ounce. Larger isn’t always cheaper.
   

• Use coupons. Check out my column on how to organize coupons.
   

• Watch the register when checking out to make sure you are getting charged the correct price.

If you are concerned how much time going to various stores will take, consider breaking up the tasks. Stop at the farm stand one day and drop into the bakery outlet another day after work. Since you are going to more than one store, it also makes it easier to split the list with a spouse or teenage driver. Also keep in mind that if you are shopping for a week or two, you won’t be doing this routine very often.

Since grocery prices are not expected to fall soon, work on organizing the related tasks. Keep all your menus in a folder. When you are exceptionally busy, you can pull them out and use them again. Start a folder for bargain recipes. Put recipes that fed your family for not a lot of bucks in that folder so that you can repeat them. Keep your receipts. You may try more than one dollar-type store. This way you can compare the costs.

Most of all, consider this an adventure rather than a chore. Every dollar you save is money you can use in other ways. Consider those dollars your reward for an organizing job well done.