Make a Shopping List

One thing that we've done that's actually cut our grocery bill in half is to make a list and stick to it. Without a list, the tendency is to just walk up and down aisles and grab what you "think" you need. You feel stupid when you grab a jar of spaghetti sauce thinking you need it only to find that you already have 4 jars at home. If you take the time to make out a list of only those things you NEED before you go shopping and stick to that list when shopping, you'll generally spend less money and actually get done shopping much faster. It's actually quite amazing the difference in what you'll spend. This is especially important if you're working on a fixed budget. I am a little more techie than most and I put my shopping list into Microsoft Excel. Over time, I added prices for the common things that I bought and therefore when making my shopping list, I'd have an idea of how much I was going to spend prior to getting there. If you're interested in the spreadsheet I've started (prices are out of date a bit and are from Wal-Mart which is where I do most of our shopping), just email me and I'll be happy to send it to you. It is in Excel, so you'll need it to be able to use it. If not, I highly recommend the free office suite OpenOffice. You can download it from http://www.openoffice.org It has an Excel compatible spreadsheet, a Word compatible word processor and a PowerPoint compatible presentation program. There are some other extras, but those are the 3 most people use. You can open Excel, Word and PowerPoint files and save them in those formats and it's FREE!!!!! Check it out!

Jamie
jamierob_98@yahoo.com