HOW TO TRACK GROCERY SAVING
Saving money while grocery shopping can be a real boost to your budget. Knowing how to track your savings is very important.
But how do you accurately calculate your savings?
Groceries are a flexible expenditure, not like your car payment or rent/mortgage. With groceries, you can fudge a little to save some money. You don’t need that gallon of ice cream anyway…
You can also buy generics instead of brand names. Then there are sale items and buying in bulk. In contrast, your car payments rent/mortgage, and some other bills are set amounts, and there’s no fudging.
Trying to save money on groceries is a logical place to find money
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You may also be interested in nine ways to save money grocery shopping
Why track your savings on groceries?
Have you ever wished you had an extra $400 to do something with? Maybe it was a car repair, a weekend excursion with a friend, or a category in your budget that’s underfunded.
How often have you gone shopping and didn’t price compare?
After all, it’s just a few dollars.
Being thrifty and looking for the best price is one of the ways you’ll be can have that extra money when you want or need it.
The money you saved can be and should be added to another category in your budget. This is especially important if you have underfunded categories.
How to track your grocery savings
In your budget, you should have a category labeled groceries and a designated amount of money. If you don’t, this is the perfect time to add it.
The amount of money you have designated should be reasonable meaning you should be able to eat healthy meals at home.
How to track your saving
You’ll need your budget, shopping list, and your spending journal. With those handy:
- Go shopping for groceries
- Make the necessary entries into your spending journal.
- Compare how much you spent shopping this time to the amount you have budgeted.
- Every time you go shopping, enter what you spent into your spending journal.
- At the end of the budgeting, period subtract how much you spent from the amount you started with.
When you do the subtraction if the number is a positive number that is the amount you saved. If it’s a negative number that’s how much you overspent.
To save money, you need to take the amount, you didn’t spend on groceries and apply it to another category in your budget.
Bonus tip How to save more
Usually buying generics is the most inexpensive way to shop.
Conclusion
There are many ways to spend less money on groceries. This makes grocery shopping a good place to start saving money.
To track your grocery savings, you need to have a budgeted amount for groceries and know how much you spend (spending journal). Subtract the amount you spent on groceries from the amount you started with. This is how much you have saved. That money should be added to an underfunded category in your budget for future use.