1. Refuse to Pay Retail!  Use the Puget Sound Grocery Guide to help you purchase items you love when they are on sale.  I do the work so you don’t have to!  Don’t spend hours a week analyzing, clipping, and filing. Just sign up for the Puget Sound Grocery Guide and you will know at a glance where the manufacturer’s coupons, store coupons, and in store specials align.

2. Plan to Save!  Take 5 minutes to plan by checking the Puget Sound Grocery Guide for deals on items you use regularly, then clip only the coupons you’ll use and go.  Five minutes of planning a week, and refusing to pay retail, could give you a receipt so impressive you end up showing it to your family, friends, and co-workers.

3. Buy Low!  When it is on sale, buy as much as you can (get 2-4 copies of the Sunday paper, one good coupon can more than pay for them).  If you buy everything you can when it is on sale, then when it doesn’t go on sale for 2 months you don’t need to pay full price for it. If the store is out of the sale item, be sure to get a Rain Check. I call this the Pantry Concept – buy low and stock up.

4. Know Your Prices!  See Everyday Values section on the Fred Meyer Example page on my website.  Those prices were noted at the end of June/early July.  It’s a good place to start.  Keep a note card of prices of items you buy regularly.  Don’t buy anything if you don’t know what it should cost!

5. Cook & Freeze! When Albertsons has their Buy One Get One Free Meat sales, plan on buying extra for easy thaw and cook meals for later. Why make one meatloaf when you can make 3 in the same amount of time and freeze 2 for later?  Same goes for Teriyaki Chicken, Pot Roast, Meatballs, and various crock pot meals. This saves not only a lot of cash, but a lot of time as well!

6. Be Courteous!  Treat the cashers with the courtesy and great respect they deserve!   We want grocery stores to keep competitor coupons policies (or adopt them).  Obnoxious coupon users give the rest of us a bad name. Where they take competitor coupons, the cashiers usually do the math in their head, so remember to be quiet while they are calculating, and never take more than 2-3 ads from the front of any store.

7. Think Cleanly! Don’t be taken to the cleaners!  Buy the best deals, not the latest fad.  You can really waste a lot of money on stuff you just don’t need. Here’s what you really need:  Laundry detergent, bleach, window cleaner, baking soda, ammonia (for vinyl floors) or oil soap for hardwoods, dish liquid, dish detergent for your dish washer, a stack of old rags and a little elbow grease.  That’s pretty much it.  Anything more is overkill and just money out of your pocket.  Don’t fall for marketing and let the latest “blank” free, or “blank” friendly clutter your brain, just Think Cleanly.