How many times have you stood behind someone in line at the grocery store and groaned to yourself as they flipped through their file of coupons? Is it really worth the extra effort to clip some coupons, and wait for the cashier to figure out how to enter them into the cash register, only to save a few cents?!

Here we decided to share a “Before and After” grocery shopping experience to give you some tips for saving money on your groceries. Is it worth clipping a couple coupons? We’ll let you decide:

Grocery Shopping: BEFORE

The first part of this experiment involved hitting the local grocery store and picking up a week’s worth of groceries for a family of 3, without using coupons and without spending time checking for sale prices. If something we were buying happened to be on sale – that was a bonus, but we didn’t make any effort to find sale prices or choose the lowest priced option.

Before heading out to the store, we figured out what meals we’d eat for the week (to make sure what we bought would be enough to last a full week) and then made a shopping list so we could at least stick to the $100 budget. Continue reading →