Winning at the grocery store has a lot to do with planning.

But before you take another step, it’s best to know how much money you have to work with. A budget tells you that. Businesses start with a budget. Households should, too.

Creating Your Budget – the Easy Six-Step Plan:

• Pull up your bank and credit card statements from the last month. If you’re ambitious, do three months. If you’re really ambitious, do a year. But don’t let perfection stop you from getting started.
• Don’t judge, just look. You want the whole picture…warts and all.
• (And if you don’t save receipts, start saving them now for fine-tuning later.

• Housing. Transportation. Health and wellness. Debt and obligations. Household expenses. Miscellaneous. That’s it.
• Keep it simple. This is quick and easy (and gives you something to work with if you decide to move to an app or spreadsheet later.)
• While you’ll want to understand the whole picture, we’re mostly interested in the household expenses category. Groceries, meals eaten outside the home, household products, and cleaning supplies. That’s where we’re headed next. That’s my lane.

• Make a column under each category for each month. (If you have yearly or twice-yearly items, make a column for them, too.) Start sorting the expenses into the columns.
• For debt items, use the minimum payment.
• If you have overdraft charges, include them here.
• If you have bills not yet paid or accounted for, just make a note of them so they aren’t forgotten.
• As you categorize, it will be easy to see what is essential and what isn’t.
• Now you start to see the bigger picture over time. This is a huge win.

• Add all the money you have coming in. You know the drill if you get paid weekly or every other week: sometimes, a month gets an extra paycheck. To get a true picture of your income, multiply your weekly pay by 52, biweekly pay by 26. Divide by 12.
• Are you tracking positive? That’s great. It means more to work with.
• Playing catch-up every month and in the negative? It’s a stressor, but now there’s an opportunity to turn that around.

• You have all the information now.
• Recopy it if you want, adding in more columns for future months.
• Going forward, it will only take a few minutes each month to update. Most categories will need only a quick review and adjustment.
• Household expenses (where groceries, dining out, food, and dining delivery services are included) will need more detail, as much as you can give it. Same with miscellaneous expenses. Work off receipts for these in the future.

6) Now take a minute to congratulate yourself! You’ve done good work.

The Next Step:

And now you know where you have extra (or not) to work on the household and miscellaneous expenses. They’re items that can be more flexible than some of the other categories. Update your budget,

Whether you have a bare amount a month to spend on these items or more, you wouldn’t be reading this if you weren’t interested in ways to maximize this budget.

(But if you clock in on the low side, you can use your budget to identify and free up money by eliminating or cutting back on unnecessary expenses. Let’s stick with groceries and basic household expenses, for right now.)

And lucky you (I’m so glad you’re here!), this is my area of expertise. Let’s explore getting started. And it all starts with planning.

The Business Plan:

Every successful business starts with a goal.

Maybe it’s to reduce grocery spending. Maybe yours is to eat better. Maybe it’s to free up money for other priorities. Whatever the goal, write it down.

Now it’s time to decide how much of your budget should go to food and basic grocery items, eating out, eating in, and delivery.

Once you know your numbers and your goal, the rest becomes strategy.

That’s where meal planning, understanding sales cycles, inventory, and knowing your suppliers, and all the business strategies come into play. We’ll tackle those too.

You might want to just slip into one of the categories below, or you might want to explore more parallels on where treating your food supply as a business will save you so much more over time.

Now for the planning, part:

• Menu Planning 101.
• Menu Inspiration
• Quick and Frugal Planning and Shopping

Links to The Twelve Strategies:

• Strategy One:  Bank Your Foods
• Strategy Two:  Pay Attention to the Bottom Line
• Strategy Three:  Control Costs –  Maximize “Profits” and Minimize Losses
• Strategy Four:  Take Advantage of Cyclic Changes in the Market
• Strategy Five:  Be an Investor, not a Gambler
• Strategy Six:  Give Back to the Community
• Strategy Seven:  Have a Business Plan
• Strategy Eight:  Invest in Training
• Strategy Nine:  Know the Products you Buy
• Strategy Ten:  Know your Suppliers
• Strategy Eleven:  Take Advantage of Special Offers & Incentives
• Strategy Twelve:  Use Sound Investment Principles