Money Saving Thoughts

1. Use your cutting board to chop your grocery tab in half
Pre-chopped, pre-sorted, pre-packaged -- man, we're lazy … and it's costing us, too. So dust off the cutting board and colander and stay away from the worked-over (and marked-up) grub. Channel your inner Julia Child – your $79-an-hour Julia Child, that is -- and slice, dice and measure at home.

When Consumer Reports sent two shoppers to the supermarket for the weekly basics, the one schooled on the cost of convenience rang up a tab that was $79 less. The biggest budget-busters were bagged veggies ($11 v. $3 for au naturel broccoli bunches), single-serving containers ($9.90 for oatmeal envelopes versus $1.59 for the canister) and pre-sliced cheese ($2 more per pound than having the deli guy work over a hunk of muenster).


2. Score supermarket deals without spending your weekend cutting coupons
You know those people who brag about how little they spent for a trunk full of groceries with coupons? Prepare to become one of them. And, no, you’re not going to have to spend hours rifling through the Sunday paper circulars or driving all around town to find the best price on frozen peas.

A simple shortcut to savings is per-unit pricing. And your grocer provides a handy cheat sheet right on the shelf! The bigger box of cereal's no bargain at $0.08 more per pound than the smaller one. And oh, the horror of the innocuous $1.39 20-ounce bottle of soda, when a few aisles away six 2-liter bottles cost just $5. That's $23.19 less than what you'd shell out for the same amount of pop in the smaller size.

3. Ignore the lure of name brands and go generic
We all know that generic, no-name brands typically cost less than their brand-name peer products. But how much less? Consumer Reports was able to cut its supermarket tab by at least one-third by sticking to store-brand items. In the magazine’s shopping experiment, it stuck to a store-brand shopping list and picked up chocolate-chip cookies, orange juice, frozen lasagna, raisin bran cereal, coffee, and peanut butter for about $24 -- nearly $10 less than what it would cost to buy name-brand fare.

(thanks Dayana Yochim, The Motley Fool)