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Jan 12, 2009    |       13 comments

Caffeine Update

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Well, it’s been tougher this time around, but my body has been cleansed of caffeine. Much to my delight, I have been able to transition to drinking just water and milk remarkably well. I wish I could say that I am feeling great, but I can’t. I seem to have picked up a bug of some sorts and I haven’t been feeling well. Perhaps my body was so out of whack for a while so that left me susceptible to something.

My husband is also doing fine with no caffeine as well. He was fine after one day. When scientists talk about genes playing a factor in addiction, I think they have something there.

This whole thing will save us money, no doubt. I think one of the nicest things about it was having a talk with our son today. He’s observant and watches what we do. He brought up the fact that there is no longer any soft drinks in our house and I was able to explain how important water is. He was able to stump my knowledge of things quite a few times, but that’s quite alright. After our talk, he grabbed a water from the fridge and handed it to me. Then he grabbed one for himself. He said he wanted us to be healthy. I’ll drink water to that!

It’s great that all of us are on board with no caffeine. We’re also committed to living a healthier life overall. That’s another reason why our grocery price book is going to be such a great tool. It can easily be modified to include key nutritional information and become an aid to menu planning (which is in the works). Each of us has a need with our diets now and I think that spreadsheet will help us meet them.

Jan 10, 2009    |       20 comments

How I Spent My Saturday – I Created a Grocery Price Book

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Something you may have heard about is creating a grocery price book. Basically, you write down the groceries you buy often and then note the price you paid for them. It’s a great tool to get the most out of your grocery money (for more background on the idea, read this great post at Get Rich Slowly).

When it comes to groceries, I have been fortunate thanks to my past experience working at a grocery store. Hours of pricing and scanning things left me with a thorough mental price book. So I never created a physical copy. While we were at the grocery store today I realized that the years have taken their toll on grocery prices and my mental book was now greatly outdated. My buying price points were way out of whack. It was time to start a new grocery price book. This time, it won’t be in my head.

I fired up a spreadsheet and listed everything in our cupboards and fridge. There are columns for item and price, as well as quantity, total, ounces and price per ounce. To help aid our grocery shopping, our price book is going to double as a shopping list. Before we go shopping, I can print out the list and look around the house to see what we need. I can also choose to add quantities on the list right on the computer and get an idea of the cost of our trip since I included a total column as well. Here’s a pic:

I thought it would take days to complete, but it didn’t take that much time at all. We really don’t have too many different things that we buy now, since we have been making more and more from scratch. Because this price book is also serving as a grocery list, I included non food items as well on it.

The end result for a few hours of my time is something that will save us money. It will also save us time since I won’t have to write a new grocery list every time (or skip the grocery list all together and end up buying things we didn’t need yet). It will keep us focused on getting the best value on our groceries.

It will probably be a month or more before we’ll need to do some major grocery shopping again. I’ll report back on how well it worked and if it indeed helped us save money.

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