My Current Grocery Shopping Strategies to Help Save Money

My current grocery shopping strategies to help save money have become vital to our current life due to changes in our life and the economy. Our grocery budget has increased since baby Fee has started various solids foods, and sometimes I need convenience to feed myself when Kyler is working nights and I am solo. And, as many of you have probably experienced, the current economy has increased prices for groceries. In this blog post, I will be sharing my grocery shopping strategies and how it impacts our spending.

Disclosure: I am a Thrive Market affiliate. I may receive a commission when you make purchases using the links in my blog posts at no additional cost to you.

Our Grocery Shopping Budget

Currently, I am still trying to figure out how to wrangle in this part of our budget. It was a lot easier with just the two of us, and we rarely give Ophelia an exclusive pureed meal, but things are all over the place sometimes for me.

Current Grocery Shopping Strategies

Grocery Shopping Strategy: Meal Planning

If you are a regular reader of The Tiny Twenty-Something, then you know how important meal planning is to me! However, since pregnancy I have totally fallen off of that track! Then a couple weeks ago, I went fully committed to 3 meals a day. Now, meal planning is back on track and more important than ever.

Meal planning can curb overzealous spending, start with reading my in-depth article: How to Make ANY Meal Plan Rotation.

Strategy: Fetch

I have been using Fetch for several months now. I started using it to build up points for gift cards. I’ve written before about grocery shopping habits that included Checkout51 and Ibotta. This is a similar app but better! Every time you make a purchase, you get 25 coins. If you buy select brands, you get 10 (or more) points per $1 spent on those items. For example, the Annie’s mac n cheese costs $5.99 at Target, I got 60 points. If I got gas, I scan the receipt and get 25 coins. If I spend money at Costco, 25 points or more if we both something like Mountain Dew.

When you reach certain thresholds, you can use your points to redeem gift cards from a long list of companies. I typically redeem for $10 gift cards to Target, but others include companies like Amazon, Ulta, and more.

Extra special brands like Huggies, the parent company Annie’s, General Mills, etc. have their own rewards programs within the app and you get bonus points for reaching certain thresholds.

Strategy: Target & RedCard

I have been saving money at Target for years now– since freshman year at college (soo like 10 years!). The grocery shopping strategy I use most is the RedCard debit card (or credit card but we have a debit card). You get 5% off every purchase. When you use Target Circle to select coupons, you can save on most relevant purchases and all savings stack. So if you buy Tide detergent, you could get $1 in store. If you buy Bounty paper towels, or Charmin toilet paper, you could get something like 10% off and then at the checkout, the additional 5% savings. With Fetch, I redeem for $10+ gift cards and add them to my Target app Wallet and everything is handled when I scan the barcode.

Strategy: Costco & Thrive Market Memberships

When it comes to purchasing annual memberships, the advice I want to emphasize the most is that you should only purchase a store membership if you will actually use the membership enough to save money. We started our Costco membership with the executive membership thinking that we would shop there enough to receive cash back at the end of the year to pay off said cost of the membership, but we didn’t so we downgraded our membership.

Costco as a Money Saving Strategy-

Costco has always been the go-to option for purchasing meats, some produce (depending on the season), ‘convenience foods’ like frozen pizzas, and bread. Our membership costs $60 and obviously if we save more than $60 worth of groceries/sundries, then the membership has been paid off.

Thrive Market as a Money Saving Strategy-

This year I started buying more baby food and baby friendly snacks on Thrive Market. I have been buying Serenity Kids food pouches a lot lately because of the convenience, organic ingredients, and I am a huge fan of puree POUCHES. I buy meat purees and produce purees. The fruit/veggies pouches can easily be split into 3 meals when I mix with cereal.

A Thrive Market Membership is $60/year and if you don’t spend/save at least $60, you will get Thrive Market Cash for the remaining amount. For instance, I didn’t shop from Thrive Market that much in 2022- I spent $40 that year- when my membership renewed, I was given $20 Thrive Market Cash (essentially a gift card).

Currently, Fee is obsessed with the chicken, beef, butternut squash, wild-caught salmon and sweet potato pouches from Serenity Kids. I feel at ease giving her these pouches because they are organic, have bone broth, and are a quick meal. For me, this is a grocery saving strategy because 1. we don’t give her the meat ones everyday, 2. the fruit or veggie ones get split into 3 meals when combined with whole grain cereal.

The cost of buying Serenity Kids varies by product, but I have not spent more than $23 per box of pouches. You get 6 3.5 ounce pouches, 1 box of a fruit or veggie pouch = 18 meals for us. She does not get a meat pouch everyday so I feel that I am saving money on baby purees. I will have an in-depth article about How to Save Money on Baby Food later and update this post with that link later!

Final Thoughts on These Grocery Shopping Strategies

I hope you found this post useful. My plan is to be more diligent about sharing actual costs of meals with you on the blog and Instagram. And I tried to arrange this post in a “cheapest to cheap” scale starting with meal planning and then strategizing with memberships.

Do you have any tips to share? Share in the comments!