Add Up Your Income

If you watch television or scroll through the Internet, then you might see advertisements from some of the local stores that you shop at. Paying attention to these advertisements and notating the prices on the items that you usually buy might also help you when it comes to saving money. Research can be a huge help when it comes to keeping the money in your wallet. You just need to know what you are researching and why.

The first step in doing this kind of research is to write down the items that you know that you will need for your household in a notebook. Dont’ write down impulse buys. Write down things that you need, like toilet paper or cleaning solution. Then, after you get this list completed, mark the names of the stores that you shop at on a page of their own. Each store should have its own page. This will help keep things organized, and if you don’t like using notebooks, you can section things out in an Excel file. Now, write down the items that you buy on each of the store pages that you have made. You want to make sure that every item is on every store page, because you are about to compare prices.

You should now have several notebook pages with different stores on them, and these pages should also list the items that you normally buy. If this is the case, then the next step is to search the Internet, television advertisements, and paper mail outs that these stores send you. Write the prices that each of these stores have for the items you regularly buy and compare them. See which store offers you the best discounts. Check out which stores offer coupons on these items. This will help you plan your shopping trip.

In planning this trip, you might want to consider whether or not you are willing to go to more than one store. If you usually venture to multiple stores during the week, you can pick the items that you need from the store that has the lowest price during your normal travels. If you don’t usually go to multiple stores during the week, then do the math. Add up the prices for all of the items that you need from the stores that provide them and see which store offers you the best price.

You also want to consider sale prices while doing this. A number of stores put certain items on sale in intervals. For instance, one of the popular laundry detergents seems to be on an extreme discount at the drugstore one week every month. The price of this product goes up the following week and goes up even more the week after that. Therefore, the price isn’t always the same. If you consider this factor, then you might be able to save more money at the store with the sale prices one week even though another store usually consistently offers low prices.

Also, if you don’t have the time to go to multiple stores, but different stores offer different prices on the items that you need, see if you can get the store that you shop at to price match. This is a process where they offer you the same price as their competitors in order to keep your business. It allows you to spend your money at their store without having to go to the other store to get the same price. However, be prepared. That store might want to see the advertisement from the other store so they can validate the other store’s prices, and some stores might not be willing to price match.