Frugal food budgeting

A big Tightwad welcome to Sylvia, who does daily market research and covers the biggies such as debt consolidation, settlement and relief, saving, investing, budgeting, credit cards etc. Today on Tightwad, Sylvia tackles food budgeting.

Budgeting helps you to save money. But frugal food budgeting helps you save even more. Being frugal helps you to learn a lot about the importance of money and you become a more responsible person in the process. Here are some tips to help you follow a frugal food budget:

1.List of the total expenditure on your food, and from that decide what can be eliminated, such as fast food and lunches out. If you cut down on these items, you will double the benefits: save money and drop a few pounds. (Tightwad note: What could be more perfect than that?)

2. Always prepare and carry a list of the food items that you need while going to shop your monthly food items. When you follow a proper list, you do not end up buying things that you do not need. This list will help you avoid impulse buys.

3. Buy your groceries using discount coupons and try the stockpiling method. This helps you to save lots of money. Stockpiling is nothing but buying the food items that you need the most in bulk. If you combine discount coupons with buying in bulk, that's consumer power in action.

4. Lower your urges for eating out. If you can’t stop yourself completely, check the online (eg. Groupon) or in magazines and newspapers for local restaurant coupons.

5. Find out how you can use those food items which you think have become useless like dried out cheese, hardened brown sugar, or a stale loaf of bread. There are various ways in which you can use these items. You can use the dried out cheese as a grated garnish, store the brown sugar in a glass jar to keep it from hardening and make croutons. Voila!

Bonus tip: Concentrating on your cooking times will save you both time and gas. You can also try out simple recipes that take less time to cook.