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StitcherAre you paying too much for groceries? With grocery items soaring due to inflation, knowing these expert-approved strategies is more important than ever. Together with Gina Zakaria, it is our mission to help you maximize your savings and keep your grocery budget in check. In this episode, we’ll ensure your next grocery visit will be less stressful and more intentional!
If we want to significantly reduce the cost of our grocery bill, it’s not just going to happen, you can’t just hope for it. It does require intentionality ahead of time.
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Check out some relevant episodes
Gina Zakaria is a financial educator and founder of Saving Whiz. She is passionate about helping others find their sweet spot in spending and saving, by being more frugal. It’s her mission to teach others how to maximize on life while saving money. Gina has appeared on MeTime with Frangela talk show and featured in Money Magazine, Yahoo Finance, and other prominent personal finance sites.
Unpopular Opinion on Couponing
Gina thinks couponing is a little overrated grocery-saving tip. It can be a hindrance for someone starting out; who feels that the only way they can save on groceries is if they sit for endless hours clipping coupons. You can save money with couponing, but there are absolutely ways where you can do it without having to cut a coupon. You also don’t have to stock up on things you wouldn’t usually buy because then you won’t save anything.
Saving Money For Grocery Bills
Setting up a routine of checking what you already have and paying attention to what’s on sale–you can check them through weekly ads. From there, you can list your shopping list and create your menu. If you make your menu first, you’re subjecting yourself to the prices of those ingredients that may or may not be on sale. It will be much easier for you to create a menu around what you already have on hand than you plan on purchasing.
Solidifying Our Saving Habits
It’s crucial to establish systems wherein she is constantly mindful by planning ahead. Gina allows everyone in her family to choose the meal they want for that week by presenting what they have on hand–her family has the freedom to choose the food they want to eat but within these limits. She ensures her family has something to look forward to, and they will enjoy her meals.
Go-to Recipes When You Feel Like Not Cooking
Surprisingly, Gina is not a kitchen girl and tries to find ways to spend the least time there. She would allow 2 hours to cook at least 2 to 3 meals every Saturday. Gina’s favorite go-to recipes would be stews and casserole dishes. Stews are low maintenance, and you could cook them while doing something else. For casseroles, she loves that you can stretch out your proteins and feed your family a pound of meat, which is vital in grocery bill savings.
Get more from Gina
Super Savers. Gina has private saving community called Super Savers and there’s an entire section dedicated to grocery savings to provide additional support and resources for anyone trying to save more money.
Bill of The Week
Thank you Gina for your bill that is a hundred dollar per week bill (sometimes even lower) on groceries while living in Los Angeles, California and having a family of 4!
Thanks so Much for Listening!
Thanks so much for listening. Many of you know we have a private community where we do monthly money challenges and offer accountability groups. We want to congratulate one of our members for a big win.
We started using Amazon subscribe & save about 7 years ago when we got our dog... to save on dog food.
It's taken me that long to realize that the "save" part is a lie! Sure we saved initially since I typically subscribe to cleaning supplies like Tide pods, hand soap, toilet bowl cleaner, and also contact solution and...random other stuff that would get added to meet the 5 item requirement to "UNLOCK MAX SAVINGS!!!"
But then I just realized well...I now have way more cleaning supplies than I actually need and the dog food is actually just 5% off, not 15% off. Maybe I just need to get dog food at Chewy.com?! And you can get much better deals on Tide Pods with the Target Circle app since there seem to always be manufacturer coupons in there.
Congrats! If you want to check out our monthly challenge community head to frugalfriendspodcast.com/club to see what challenge we have coming up next.
And keep leaving us reviews on iTunes or Stitcher, and sending the screenshot to reviews@frugalfriendspodcast.com. And don’t forget to share your favorite quote from the episode by using the hashtag #FrugalFriendsNote. 
