Sunday, February 20, 2011

Let Somone Else do Your Work for You!

I have found it really time consuming to go through the grocery fliers every week trying to identify good deals. In some cases I recognize the good deals right away, but I still struggle with knowing the base price of most products. This causes me to walk around stores for hours trying to establish baselines and find deals. That is why I almost sobbed in happiness when I found a blog where an expert goes through the Ottawa grocery fliers and picks out the good deals!  Hallelujah! This week I picked up their gold pick, which is a bag of frozen jumbo raw zipper back tiger shrimp for $5 off. They were SOOOO good that we went back and picked up another bag. That's $5 for the project and $5 for the real me.  I am so glad I found this blog.  Now I can spend more time buying the deals and less time trying to find them. This is a lesson I can try to bring with me into my future endeavors - Look for cases where others have already done the work for you.  No point trying to invent the wheel.  You might miss a deal or two, but you'll find many more deals than you would have if you tried to do it yourself. Hopefully the project will pick up in the next month with this in my arsenal.

Flip

Monday, February 7, 2011

Collecting Data

I'm really having trouble finding grocery savings that meet the 1% threshold rule, especially since I have to split half of the savings with the 'real world me'. I have realised that part of the problem is that even though I have been trying to save for a while, there are many items in the weekly flyers that I still don't know what the normal cost would be so it's difficult to spot the deals. So it's time to do something more drastic. Last Friday I walked through the local grocery store and wrote down the price of over 100 things. I plan to do this every two weeks or so until I can't stand it anymore. It took me over an hour, but it will be worth it because I will end up with a database on what my normal purchases usually cost so I can spot the deals and even see the seasonal valleys and peaks for each item. Some might think this is a bit overboard, but I am determined to keep doubling and this is what I have to do to do it right now. And as an added bonus, it will make me save money in the future when groceries are off the doubling radar.

Flip