No matter how much firs poured from TV screens (they say that the government controls the prices of goods from the food basket), statistics are a stubborn thing. The cost of conditional food is rising again The cost of a conditional (minimum) set of food products. If in October 2017 it was 3,715 rubles, then in May 2018 it is already at the level of 3,970 rubles.
Growth by 255 rubles in six months
According to experts, prices will continue to rise. So it's time to learn how to save money. We will show you how to spend a minimum of money on food.
In the shop
1. Make a shopping list and follow it strictly
To do this, develop a menu for the week: breakfast, lunch and dinner. Inspect the kitchen cabinets and refrigerator and add to the shopping list the ingredients that are missing for the preparation of the intended dishes. Nothing extra!
Mobile apps help you manage your shopping list.
2. Compare prices across stores
Buying everything in one supermarket is convenient. But sometimes, if you walk to the bakery around the corner, you can get tastier and cheaper bread.
If there is no time for monitoring, try to buy once a week. “Today I will buy cottage cheese, and tomorrow I will go and buy more eggs” - an approach that leads to unplanned expenses.
Well, use special applications.
3. Attend agricultural fairs
Usually they take place in autumn and spring, and there you can buy farm products at a very low price: potatoes, eggs, and others.
4. Avoid Impulse Buying
Do not buy products not from the list just because they are cheap or suddenly you want to: “Oh! Discount on Chinese cabbage! You have to take it, usually it is 10 rubles more expensive” (are you sure you will eat it?), “Mmm, a cake! Want! Want!" (but what about the diet?).
Do not take children to the store: their “want” is harder to resist. Willpower alone will not save.
5. Use discount cards
You may have to pay for its purchase, but this is a one-time expense, and discounts can be used every time you visit this store.
6. Shop in bulk
Flour, sugar, salt, pasta and spices are always needed. Plus they have a long shelf life. So, you can take it for the future. Moreover, prices in wholesale outlets are usually lower.
“Where do I need so much? I have nowhere to store it, ”- typical objections of housewives to the advice to buy products in large quantities. The solution is simple: shop with your friends. By purchasing a bag of rice and dividing it among yourselves, you will quickly see the benefits of this approach.
According to the rules of merchandising, the most expensive goods are placed on the shelves at the level of the buyer's eyes, and the cheapest - on the lower racks. Don't be lazy to bend over and study the range below.
comefare.com Also, don't look into sections you don't need (separate the items on the list into groups: meats, vegetables, and so on). And do not forget that you should visit the store full.
8. Turn off "autopilot"
We often wander around the store, thinking about our own thoughts and automatically putting products in the basket. Remember how insulting it is when you find out at home that the apples are broken and the cookies in the pack are broken. Choose your products carefully.
9. Don't overpay for a name
Brand name products are more expensive. But this is not always a guarantee of quality and taste. Take a closer look at less famous, but cheaper counterparts. For example, trademarks of chain stores. As a rule, the taste characteristics of popular goods (vegetable oil, groceries, etc.) do not differ from branded ones.
10. Don't overpay for packaging
Milk in a nondescript package can be tastier and cheaper than a drink in a bottle, and bulk products by weight are more profitable than those packaged in colorful boxes.
11. Pay attention to weight and volume
Often on the shelves there is the same product, but one is cheaper than the other, for example, by 5 rubles. Do not rush to grab what is cheaper. Compare the difference in weight or volume of these products. It is more profitable to take a "full" kilogram than 940 grams.
12. Don't buy convenience foods.
They are a priori more expensive than self-cooked (from "A" to "Z") dishes. Do not let yourself be lazy: cook, and yourself and store them in the freezer.
And further. Sliced bread and sausage are always more expensive. Can't you cut the loaf yourself?
13. Don't be afraid of delinquency
The discount policy of chain grocery stores is a subject for a separate discussion. But when the product expires, sellers are ready to be really generous. As a rule, products "with a timer" are quite suitable. The main thing is to use them as soon as possible.
The exception is dairy products. It is easy to get food poisoning with them, so it is better to buy only fresh.
14. Don't splurge on bottled water
It is more profitable to buy once a filter for cleaning.
15. Keep receipts
In the kitchen
1. Adjust your diet
For example, include poultry meat in the menu instead of fresh fish that has noticeably risen in price. Replace ingredients with cheaper ones whenever possible (pink salmon instead of trout, Adyghe cheeses instead of mozzarella).
Nothing compares to a juicy tenderloin steak, but liver, heart and other offal can be cooked very tasty. Buy them from time to time instead of meat - save money and upgrade your culinary skills.
3. Don't overcook
There are housewives from whom "the hand does not take much." If you cook borsch, then in a large saucepan, if you fry cutlets, then a full frying pan. Such waste, as a rule, ends with the fact that half of the cooked flies into the trash can. Learn to cook exactly as much as you eat.
Alternatively, don't cook until you've eaten what's been cooked.
4. Follow Cooking Websites
There are often budget recipes. Keep them for yourself. They will help you create a weekly menu and shopping list.
5. Use seasonal vegetables and fruits
Salad of fresh tomatoes and cucumbers in winter can cost a pretty penny. Cabbage and carrots are much cheaper this time of year. Make a salad of them - it will come out just as tasty and healthy.
6. Cook yourself
It's about what you can do at home. For example, kvass. In the store, a one and a half liter bottle of this drink costs an average of 50 rubles. Three liters of homemade kvass will cost you only 20 rubles.
You can save even more on and.
7. Make blanks
It's not about three-liter jars of pickles. With the modern pace of life and urbanization, this is an amateur activity. But everyone can freeze greens and berries.
Finely chop parsley, dill and other favorite herbs, put in a container and send to the freezer. Fragrant seasoning is always at hand.
8. Eat Perishable Foods First
We bought yogurt, put it in the refrigerator, and five days later, when we remembered it and wanted to eat it, it turned out that it was expired. As a result, several tens of rubles are sent to the trash. Familiar?
In order not to get into such situations again, stick bright stickers on perishable products: “eat by Thursday”, “use by the end of the week”, and so on.
holodilnik.info 9. Store food properly
Compliance with storage conditions prevents premature spoilage of products. The more frugal you are about food, the less often you will have to replenish food supplies.
By the way, about thrift. Many products can be given a "second life". Is the bread starting to dry out? Make crackers and add to salads.
As you can see, to save on food, it is not necessary to be a pedant. Anyone can follow these guidelines. But most importantly, don't be fanatical. Sometimes you can and should allow yourself something tasty or favorite.
I wrote the title of the article and was horrified. The phrase “save on food” sounds so monstrous that poverty, poverty and empty shelves materialize right before your eyes. But if you are reading this post, then you have the Internet and everything is not as bad as it might seem at first glance. 🙂
I intuitively do not like the message “save on food” so I'll change it a bit to “reconsider the cost of food, in order to reduce costs and improve the overall health of the family” . Let's try to find a balance between delicious, healthy food and savings.
I have been managing the family budget for several years now and I know for sure that the cost of food every month is 20-22% of the total budget. The amount is quite decent, it is almost a quarter of all expenses for the month.
The first thing to do is to understand how much you really spend on food. The figure should not be approximate, but quite specific - taking into account meals at work, cafes and restaurants on the day off. And don't forget coffee at lunchtime.
1. So let's write it down - the first thing you need enter food cost accounting. Yes, it's boring, but not deadly. 🙂 It is quite enough to collect checks for two months to understand the scale of the disaster. Next, you need to try to cut the budget as a first approximation by at least 5-10%.
2. In austerity mode, it is better to immediately say “no” to gatherings in a cafe, ordering pizza and sushi, buying ready-made food in a supermarket. That's 10% savings for you.
3. If at work you are used to ordering a business lunch, then you should know that this is another hole in the budget. Try to take food with you from home.
4. Very helpful hostess. It still remains a mystery to me why this works, but with a menu, I personally experienced real budget savings of about 10-15%.
I will share my little life hack regarding the menu for the week. I was insanely burdened by the idea of compiling a weekly list of dishes, and I came up with my own version. I made a table in Excel, divided it into three columns (first, side dish, second), gathered my will into a fist and filled out the table once. Enter only those dishes that your family eats. For example, soup is not on my list because no one really likes it. Second courses can be the simplest. Do not forget that you still have to cook them later.
This table works very simply - you stupidly go through the list. The borscht is over, we look at what's next and buy groceries. If for the second pilaf, then we don’t cook the side dish. We repeat the cycle every time. Try to think over and diversify the menu, include fish at least once a week, do not put chicken on the list, followed by chicken breast cutlets. Voila, your “endless” menu is ready! From time to time, you can delete and add something. We buy products strictly for the planned dishes.
Let's move on to the grocery cart.
5. The first contender for deletion from the list of products - sausages. It's far from the healthiest food in the world. Yes, and a normal sausage costs from 450 rubles per kg. - significantly higher than the cost of meat.
But what if the family loves sandwiches? We offer an alternative! I give the simplest recipe for a la "sausages" for sandwiches.
Pastorma. We take a chicken breast (whole) and soak it in a saline solution for a day (60 g of salt per 1 liter). In the evening, put the breast on a napkin to dry, and then coat with spices (pepper, mustard, garlic). Spices choose to your taste. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees, put the breast for 30 minutes. Next, turn off the oven and leave the breast in it to cool until morning.
In addition to pastorma, you can make liver pate or “smoked” brisket. There are a huge number of such recipes on the Internet.
6. Do you often buy snacks? Seeds, chips, peanuts, crackers? You'd be surprised how much money it takes. By the way, crackers can be perfectly dried at home.
7. Packaged juices and lemonade are sent after the chips. From a nutritional point of view, these are not healthy foods.
8. Sweets for tea. It's kind of sad without sweets. I will not urge you to remove sweets and cookies from your diet, but be sure to analyze their quantity and quality. Especially for cookies. For baking on an industrial scale, margarine is used, which is not good.
What then to eat?
9.
Meat. It is better to take whole chicken carcasses. Thighs, drumsticks and wings can be fried, the breast can be put on pastorma or simply used in salads, and from what is left you can cook the broth. By the way, the broth freezes perfectly.
Beef is now quite expensive. Try replacing it with turkey (thigh).
10. Vegetables. This is a huge area to work on. We somehow got used to the set - potatoes, cabbage, peas ... oh. Focus on the season. You should not buy eggplants and zucchini in winter at exorbitant prices, but in autumn these vegetables will perfectly diversify the menu. Do not forget about legumes - beans, chickpeas. It is a useful vegetable protein.
The crisis that has fallen on the world has forced everyone to reconsider their approach to life in general and to nutrition in particular. This is especially true for those who have lost or are afraid of losing their jobs. In general, saving on food during a crisis is a bad idea, since it is in difficult times that it is important to have a clear head and good physical shape, which almost completely depend on what we eat. Therefore, even if the family budget has drastically decreased, you should not switch exclusively to potatoes and pasta for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but it is definitely worth thinking a little more about the family diet. Our family has already done this, and it seems to me that there are results.
The main rule of "anti-crisis" nutrition is that we buy less finished products and semi-finished products and cook more ourselves. At first glance, it seems that it takes a very long time, but it is not at all necessary to prepare complex dishes every day. On the contrary, often the simplest meals available are the tastiest, healthiest, and most nutritious. The next rule is that in the diet we use predominantly products of local producers, or if we cannot do without imported products, we choose those that do not cross the oceans to get to our table.
So what do we eat and what do we cook with?
Food should be a) healthy and nutritious, b) tasty, c) easy to prepare. All these qualities are possessed, for example, by the so-called legumes, i.e. a variety of cereals and legumes such as peas, lentils, beans, chickpeas and mung beans. Among the cereals there are many undeservedly forgotten, but hearty, tasty and easy to prepare, which go well with vegetables, but are also good on their own. I recently rediscovered barley. The issue price is about 20 rubles per kilogram, and you can cook both soup and a second dish like pilaf. From chickpeas, which are not the most common in our country, you can cook them as a salad, if you sprout it and mix it with vegetables, and cutlets, and a second course. The same applies to lentils. From simple rice, you can cook both traditional side dishes or pilaf, as well as more exotic, but no less tasty croquettes, if you mix boiled rice with cheese and spices to taste and lightly fry. In addition to ease of preparation and low price, pulses are rich in easily digestible protein and vitamins, and are also very nutritious.
Do not forget about potatoes, which can not only be fried, boiled and stewed, but also cooked in a casserole, poured with cream and sprinkled with cheese, as well as adding other vegetables and herbs. Such a dish is not only tasty, but also very beautiful, and may well play the role of a festive dish. From this vegetable you can cook a lot of other delicious dishes. It is worth remembering the advice of the heroine of the film "Girls"!
If all these dishes seem boring and monotonous to you, spices will come to the rescue. Their cost is low, and the effect can be amazing. Ginger and soy sauce will give the dish "Japanese" notes, and cumin, turmeric and mint will make the same dish "Indian". Do not forget about the traditional parsley, dill, garlic and bay leaf. Feel free to combine spices, and your lunches and dinners will always be tasty and varied.
Vegetables form the basis of our family's diet. The crisis forced us to push into the background exotics such as avocados, leeks, as well as greenhouse cucumbers and tomatoes, which, in addition to being expensive, are also very unhealthy, although from time to time we indulge ourselves with them, and to recall the more typical radishes for our area, beets, white cabbage and carrots. These vegetables are perfectly stored, and salads from them, both raw and boiled, are a real storehouse of vitamins. Combine them with each other in different ways, add spices and herbs, and you will never know what beriberi is.
Those who have their own summer cottage are more fortunate, except that they have to work a little. But the reward for labor will be healthy and tasty food all year round, fresh, frozen, canned or dried. If you don’t have your own summer cottage, frozen vegetables or home-made canned food will come to the rescue. In the summer season, you can buy them in small wholesale at a very inexpensive price and freeze enough to last for a couple of months, or even for the whole winter. When defrosted, not all vegetables are tasty, but they are quite suitable for preparing second courses, and defrosted greens (parsley, dill, arugula) almost do not differ in taste from fresh ones. In addition, fresh herbs are available almost all year round even to those who do not have dachas. Everyone remembers how our grandmothers put an onion on a jar of water for forcing a feather. Why not take advantage of this experience? And watercress grows well in flower pots. If you have a balcony, then in the spring-summer season it can turn into a greenhouse, where it is quite possible to grow even peppers. Last season, it was these "balcony" peppers that gave me the best harvest.
We all love fruits, but it is difficult to save on them, since most of them simply do not grow in our climate. But almost all fruit shops often offer a so-called "fruit pack", consisting of slightly spoiled fruits, at a reduced price. It is difficult to eat them fresh, but they are quite suitable for baking. In my family, a pie made from spoiled tangerines, bananas and pumpkins was a resounding success.
What about bread? It is better to bake it yourself. This idea seems complicated only at first glance. In fact, it turns out that concocting delicious bread, both yeast-based and more healthy yeast-free, on sourdough, is very simple, especially if you are the owner of a bread machine. But even if you don’t have this unit, excellent bread is obtained in a conventional oven. I bake unleavened sourdough bread. I knead in the morning or closer to dinner, put it in a warm place for 5-6 hours, and in the evening I pamper my home with a fresh loaf. Homemade bread not only tastes better, it's also healthier because you know what ingredients you put in it, and you can make the bread just the way you want it. Play with different types of flour (buckwheat, flaxseed, corn, oatmeal, spelled, rye, whole grain wheat), add spices, seeds, herbs, and soon you will be known as a master of baking, and your family will never look at tasteless store-bought rolls. If the listed ingredients seem expensive to you, try comparing the price of finished products with your unique bread.
The crisis is the time to remove from your diet a lot of products, mostly factory-made, the dangers of which we know, but continue to use out of habit, and replace them with more natural and healthy counterparts. For example, mayonnaise can be prepared by yourself from 1/3 milk and 2/3 olive oil, mixing them with a blender and adding a little mustard powder, salt, lemon juice to taste. It's also easy to make your own salad dressings instead of store-bought ones. The ingredients can be very different - lemon juice, vegetable oils, spices, herbs, garlic, apple cider vinegar. By the way, for several years now I have also been making the last one myself from the summer harvest of apples.
Where do we buy?
An equally important question is where do we buy products? It is worth considering different options. First, you can try to buy products in "small wholesale", i.e. large packages. In terms of a kilogram / liter of product, large volumes may not be so profitable, but a purchased bag of flour or sugar, for example, will allow you to “freeze” the price of this product for at least a few months, which in these times, when prices are rising by eyes, can be very beneficial.
A great option - products by weight. In large networks like Ausha, you can buy not only vegetables and fruits in this way, but also sweets, cookies, cereals, pasta, breakfast cereals, nuts, tea, coffee, frozen products and much more. This approach will solve several problems at once. First, it reduces the need to visit stores frequently, which also saves gas and time. Secondly, by buying products in bulk in your bags, you reduce the burden on the environment, because. no need to throw away a huge amount of packaging. Thirdly, it is significantly cheaper. A kilogram of frozen broccoli by weight, for example, costs the same as a 400-gram package. The only drawback of such "small wholesale" purchases is the need for a large amount of storage space at home.
I also advise you to look at the small shops near the house. In such stores, you can often find departments of dairy products from local producers at much more affordable prices than the same products in large chains. Not so long ago, I discovered such a department of dairy products a few meters from the house. They offer the freshest draft sour cream, cottage cheese and milk, and packaged products in such shops cost less than in chain stores.
We buy fresh vegetables and fruits at the local market, where mostly citizens from neighboring countries trade. I strongly advise you to make friends with the sellers and become their regular customer. You will be given discounts "for friendship" and offer products of higher quality, and sometimes give small "bonuses".
Many people are now interested in how to cook economically, without spending a lot of money on food, but at the same time so that it is tasty, healthy and satisfying. And it's not as difficult as it might seem at first glance. Let's figure out how you can save on food without infringing on your household, and so that this does not affect your health. On the site in the "Cooking sparingly" section, you can see the simplest and most delicious dishes made from cheap products, and make sure that you can significantly reduce food costs and spend money on other needs.
save on meat
Meat is perhaps the most expensive product of all the components of the everyday menu. Although the fish is not cheap now. Let's see how these products can be replaced or reduced at the expense of other useful products.
How to cook simple and tasty food without meat
Beans, peas, chickpeas, lentils are healthy, satisfying, and may well save your budget on food. For example, look at the cooking recipe - you can eat quite satisfyingly with it. And in terms of its beneficial properties, beans do not lag behind meat, and in many ways even surpass it. If you don’t want to be completely meatless, you can mix, for example, minced meat for cutlets with boiled beans.
It will also be delicious to cook borsch not with meat, but with beans, soup with peas, roast potatoes with chickpeas. And lentil soup is generally a nutritious and excellent dish that can completely replace a whole dinner. To do this, you need to put more lentils, and you get such a hearty stew that it is quite possible to eat it for lunch.
You can cook from lentils that your household will be happy to eat. You can make a lentil salad with potatoes, canned food, peas and have a pretty decent breakfast.
We use offal instead of meat
If you haven't done it yet, I highly recommend it. Offal is very helpful in terms of saving money. Many dishes can be prepared from the liver - a liver cake for the festive table, fried liver in sour cream sauce for any side dish. Add to this a fresh vegetable salad and you have a great lunch dish.
From the liver (pork, chicken, beef) you can cook a wonderful pate. It cannot be compared with store-bought pates stuffed with all sorts of rubbish, tasty and easy to prepare. See which will help you out both for sandwiches for breakfast and added to pasta for lunch.
You can cook a wonderful dish from chicken hearts and ventricles by frying them with onions and stewing them in sour cream sauce. Prepare a side dish of puree or buckwheat porridge for them and get an excellent option for a budget and tasty lunch.
You can cook with kidneys, which your household will like, from pork or beef tails - hearty borscht, from chicken wings - delicious soup with vermicelli. With offal, you can fry pies or pancakes. You just need to boil everything, cut it, overcook it a little with onions, twist it through a meat grinder - and the filling for pies is ready - economically and simply.
We dilute the meat with vegetables
You can also save a lot on food if you add vegetables to the meat. For example, cook and get a hearty meal with a minimum of meat, tasty and healthy. Any side dish is suitable for them, and an eggplant salad will complement the dish and get a hearty and tasty lunch.
You can also dilute the meat sauce for side dishes. Take a piece of any meat, cut into pieces. Fry the onion in oil, add meat, chopped vegetables to it (bell peppers, tomatoes, carrots, simmer until tender. Add spices, herbs, a couple of tablespoons of sour cream - you have a delicious gravy.
We use meat sparingly
From a piece of meat of 1 kg, you can fry chops and eat everything at once, or you can cook several dishes from it. For example, with 300 g of meat it will turn out great, 300 g will go to borscht, and another 400 g will go to delicious cutlets, in which we add potatoes, onions and carrots, and you get three dishes, tasty and satisfying, from which you can feed your household for several days .
Buy bones with meat
The bones, which have leftover meat, are not expensive, and you can cook several dishes from them at once. Boil the broth for soup or borscht from the bones, remove the bones, cool, select the meat from them. In a frying pan, fry the onion, grated carrot, add the meat from the bones, a couple of tablespoons of sour cream, salt, pepper, herbs and get a great gravy for the side dish.
use mushrooms
With mushrooms, you can cook many delicious, satisfying and healthy dishes. For example, a wonderful breakfast for the whole family, fried potatoes with mushrooms is an excellent lunch, and if you add a salad to it, you can have a wonderful and satisfying meal for dinner. Also, mushrooms can be added to salads, like beans, for example, in vinaigrette or potato salad with cucumbers and eggs. With mushrooms, you can stew cabbage, cook soup or make a roast.
use pumpkin
Even if you think you don't like pumpkin, you can try it, or fry pumpkin pancakes, or bake an apple and pumpkin pie, and you will understand how tasty, economical and simple it is. And with pumpkin you can cook a wonderful porridge in milk and feed your kids. And if you consider how useful this vegetable is, it becomes completely clear that you cannot refuse it, and at least once a week you need to include pumpkin in your diet.
Lavash breakfasts
This is such a simple breakfast option - you can't imagine it being easier! You buy thin Armenian lavash, spread it with any filling (bean pate, sausage, cheese, cabbage, potatoes with onions and mushrooms, stewed cabbage, liver pate), roll it into a tube, cut into pancakes in portions and lightly fry in oil. Everything is thin, crispy, ready in 5 minutes!
Making pancakes for breakfast
If you haven't tried baking pancakes yet, start now! Believe me, it is not difficult at all, satisfying and economical. Pancakes can be fried in advance, and in the morning just wrap the filling in them, heat them up in the microwave or in a frying pan - and that's it, breakfast is ready. In the filling, you can use the remaining potatoes, stewed cabbage, mixing it with sausage, cottage cheese, and even a bunch of all kinds of products.
Replace sausage with homemade delicacies
Sausage is an expensive and not very useful product with a bunch of all kinds of harmful additives. Instead, you can cook delicious boiled pork for your family, bake chicken rolls with different fillings - it will be tastier, cheaper and healthier.
Potato Dishes
Many dishes can be prepared from potatoes - fried, boiled in their uniforms, served with butter with onions and pickles, and if also with herring - very tasty and satisfying. You can make excellent zrazy, cutlets from potatoes, stew potatoes with cabbage and rice, make potato pancakes, bake with fish in the oven, bake pies or pancakes with potatoes. So you learn how to cook cheaply and at the same time the quality of food will not suffer.
cabbage dishes
Do not ignore cabbage - you can cook a lot of dishes from it, ranging from cabbage rolls with and without meat, pies with cabbage, dumplings, pies and ending with just stewed cabbage or vegetable cutlets. Go ahead and see how much money you have left with such economical use of products. In the following articles, we will look at specific examples of how to cook delicious, satisfying and economical meals for the whole family, breakfast and dinner.
Fish meals
Fish can also be cooked inexpensively. For example, buy carp larger than your palm. Clean, carve (that is, make incisions in front of the knife - this is so that the bones are fried, the fish is bony), and fry in a pan. The puree was boiled, the cabbage salad was chopped - and an excellent and economical dinner is ready.
You can cook a lot of dishes from the pelengas - the fish is not expensive at all. And bake in the oven with potatoes, and fry with vegetables in a pan, plus a side dish of porridge, salad - again, a delicious dinner is ready. You collect fish heads and tails in the freezer, and then cook a delicious fish soup. Economical, simple and delicious. From small fish you can fry, from inexpensive canned food like saury - cook soup, make a salad, boil pasta and mix with mashed fish. There are a lot of options - experiment, and save a lot of money.
Why do we leave a lot of money after going to the supermarket for groceries? And if you look closely, not many products were bought. Or they went for bread and milk, and bought something completely different and “only” for a couple of thousand. And it seems that we don’t use delicacies, such as black caviar (only on holidays, and even then a little bit), and the money spent on food is not small. The most important thing is not how much we buy, but what we buy. Most of the cost of food goes to all sorts of empty products that do not carry any value for the body (except psychological). These are various sweets, chips, snacks for beer, soda, fast food (where without it) and other nonsense.
So is it possible to save on food? Can! And even NECESSARY!
If you have an image of concentration camp prisoners, thin and sickly, in your head, you are deeply mistaken. You can easily reduce your food costs while eating more properly, nutritiously and healthily. And most importantly - no restrictions in terms of diets (hunger is not about us). In general, the usual natural food! What are we doing? We change eating habits and spend money in stores correctly.
Simple ways to save on food
- buy only from the list. This eliminates the possibility of buying unnecessary products
- don't go shopping hungry. Collect a lot of extra products
- use discount cards
- buy stock items. Let's say sunflower oil is sold with a 30% discount. Buy several bottles at once in reserve, say for a year. Imagine that you invested this money at a 30% return. Agree - very good
- buy long-term stored products in bulk, or take in large packages
- if you ran into the store only for bread (milk, yogurt) do not take a basket - you can collect a lot of excess
- Go to the store as little as possible, say once a week. Daily hikes are fraught with unwanted purchases of extra (and useless) food
- no semi-finished products and ready meals. Natural products are much cheaper and healthier
- do not buy goods located at the checkout. As a rule, this is any expensive nonsense (chocolates, chewing gum), or stale goods that need to be sold quickly. Standing in line, a person mechanically considers all this, and often buys. Again, this is a waste of money.
- know the prices of at least basic products and always check the receipt. It happens that the price of a product in some "fabulous" way increases in the check by 2 times. Apparently, while you were walking to the cashier, inflation also did not stand still -:)
- the most expensive products are located at eye level and on the shelf above and below. Accordingly, we look even higher or lower - and there they look at us and wait for them to be bought products at the best price for us.
- according to statistics, 30% of food goes to waste (not finished, rotten, tired), and along with them go to waste and the money paid for these products. Consider reducing the amount of food you prepare or the amount of purchased, perishable food.
- no "empty" and harmful products. We also have our own national sweets: juice in packs, soda can be replaced with fruit drinks and kvass; fast food for pies and pies; chips, crackers for seeds and nuts, and so on.
- buy seasonal vegetables and fruits. Make supplies (canned food, jam, freezing, salting) for the winter.
- try to buy only local products. They are cheaper and fresher than those brought from who knows where, and who knows when.
- The more beautiful the packaging, the more expensive the product. We pay attention to composition and quality.
- check prices in neighboring stores. Surely, in one store some products are cheaper, in the second - others
- take the bag with you to the store. Of course, the savings are small, but if you count for a year?
Using these tips (all together, or just some) you can save up to 50% of your food costs. I do not call for an ascetic lifestyle. If you really want to treat yourself to something tasty and harmful, why not. The main thing is to observe moderation. After all, in order to enjoy the taste of chocolate, it is enough to eat 1-2 slices, and not to gobble up a whole bar. You will enjoy both.
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