Affording a Vacation or Cruise — Use Grocery Coupons to Pay for it

One prob­lem most fam­i­lies face today in try­ing to take a vaca­tion or cruise is fig­ur­ing out how to pay for it. Sav­ing for vaca­tion or cruise when a fam­ily is liv­ing pay­check to pay­check can often be daunt­ing and usu­ally does not hap­pen unless they have a plan for it.

One way our fam­ily has found to pay for our vaca­tion or cruise is gro­cery coupons and stock shop­ping it is not as crazy as it sounds. I will admit that this takes time and effort, but the pay-off of a week relax­ing with no wor­ries was def­i­nitely worth it.

The first thing you have to do is change your per­spec­tive when gro­cery shop­ping and menu plan­ning, rather then plan­ning a menu and then doing your shop­ping to the menu you need to check your home stock and plan your menu to what is on your shelves buy­ing only what you need to com­plete the menu, which we refer to as “needs shop­ping”. Then you have to redi­rect your reg­u­lar gro­cery shop­ping to fill­ing those shelves when things are on sale and when pos­si­ble you have a coupon for it, which we refer to as “stock shop­ping”. Also, if you have some sort of brand loy­alty you will have to cast that out the win­dow because you are out to save money, if buy­ing Best Foods will save you money over buy­ing Mir­a­cle Whip, buy Best Foods.

Ini­tially chang­ing gro­cery pat­terns may cost you a lit­tle more in the short term because you will have to do more needs shop­ping to round out your menus while you start fill­ing the shelves with stock shop­ping but over a few weeks it will bal­ance out then it will save you money.

First, use your cur­rent gro­cery bud­get, this is usu­ally around $100 per house­hold mem­ber but may be as high as $150 each. For my fam­ily of six humans, three dogs and 4 cats I bud­get $650, this is not just for food but for non-food con­sum­ables like paper tow­els, per­sonal main­te­nance items, etc. If pos­si­ble use a sep­a­rate account for this so that the money is kept sep­a­rate from other items as this will not only be your gro­cery fund but your vaca­tion or cruise fund as well.

Next, let’s talk coupons. These nifty lit­tle items are well worth your time in col­lect­ing and sav­ing. I view each coupon as phys­i­cal money in my account; often the face value is fifty cents up to as much as ten dol­lars. Man­u­fac­tur­ers’ coupons are good for money off of spe­cific prod­ucts; I save the ones that are for prod­ucts that I will use and some­times save the ones that I may or may not use if they may be a good value at some point. Per­son­ally we get the Sun­day Paper at home and I check what coupons are avail­able each week. If there are a lot of use­ful coupons in the paper I go to the store and I get extra copies of that paper, the extra $1-$1.50 each is worth it if I am going to save con­sid­er­ably more in the long run. If you wait until Tues­day to get the extra copies the store man­ager may allow you to take extra coupon sec­tions if you are buy­ing a copy of the paper since they will be going into recy­cling bins anyway.

Track­ing and fil­ing the coupons can be a task and each per­son will have a pre­ferred method for doing so. Basi­cally though there are two ways to han­dle it, 1 is to keep each coupon cir­cu­lar in a file and pull it out when you find items on sale that you will be using, the other is what I do, which is cut the coupons that I will use and put them in a coupon file, then carry that file with you to the store so that you can get the coupons you want and use them right then.

Now pick one or two store to do your stock shop­ping and you may want a third store to do your needs shop­ping, at least until your stock starts fill­ing almost all of your needs. Why would I sug­gest you have two or three dif­fer­ent places to do your shop­ping? Sim­ply put, to save money. Here in Port­land we have a selec­tion of stores to choose from, I use Albertson’s and Safe­way to do the bulk of my stock shop­ping, and only my stock shop­ping. This is because I can save money on my stock shop­ping with them but not on my needs shop­ping because needs items are usu­ally bought when needed they are usu­ally not on sale when I need them. For our needs shop­ping we use WinCo, which is a chain store that has level low prices.

What do you look for in a store to use for stock shop­ping? First and fore­most sales where the items you want to stock on your shelves are way below the level low price you would get at your needs shop­ping store. For exam­ple, boxed cereal can range from $3 to $5 a box, even at your needs store. But it is reg­u­larly put on sale for 3 for $5 or 4 for $6 as a loss leader for most gro­cery stores. Sec­ondly you want a store that give you extra off, espe­cially when you use coupons, Safe­way offers dou­ble coupons, in Port­land it is lim­ited to 4 items at 50 cents each, but that is still an extra $2 off your bill. Albertson’s will honor any other stores coupons, so I can use the Safe­way dou­ble coupon there with a dou­ble coupon from Thrift­way. Lots of stores offer $5-$10 off coupons with a pur­chase of $50 or more, so those are use­ful too, and can be used at Albertson’s too.

When I go stock shop­ping I have 3 basic rules that I follow:

1. The item must be some­thing that I will use.

2. The item must truly be on sale (lot’s of items will go on a faux sale and you want to avoid those).

3. If pos­si­ble I must have a coupon for the item. Some items like fresh meat, fruit, & veg­eta­bles won’t have coupons.

I then walk through the store and I stock up on sale items that I hope­fully have coupons for and I only buy those items. I use a cal­cu­la­tor so that I know when I have reached any dol­lar value that I need to in order to meet any big dol­lar coupons and I wrap up when I hit that point. This does take time and it means that I make more then one trip into the store, but sav­ing that extra $5-$15 dol­lars is worth it. What do I mean sav­ing the extra $5-$15? For exam­ple, Safe­way run a $10 off $50 coupon and has dou­ble coupons, Thrift­way has dou­ble coupons. When I go to Albertson’s I use my cal­cu­la­tor and when my cart hits $55 after man­u­fac­tur­ers coupons I head to the cashier. She rings my order up, often top­ping $100 then starts tak­ing all of my man­u­fac­turer coupons off and my com­peti­tors coupons and my bill gets to around $55, the cashier then takes the $2 off for the Safe­way dou­ble coupon, $2 off for the Thrift­way dou­ble coupon, and since my bill is still over $50 they take $10 off for the Safe­way $10 coupon mak­ing my total bill $41. So using Man­u­fac­tur­ers Coupons and Com­peti­tors Coupons I took a bill that was over $100 and only paid $41.

Now I am going to use a recent stock shop­ping trip to show where the sav­ings comes from:

Item Nor­mal Price Sale Price w/ Coupon

GM Cereal (4) 12.76 4.67

Hunts Pud­ding Cups (4) 7.72 2.00

Wish­bone Salad Dress­ing (2) 6.58 3.28

Pills­bury Brownie Mix (2) 4.94 2.00

Alpo Canned Dog Food (6) 7.50 0.00

Elec­trol­sol (5) 22.45 0.00

Yogurt (10) 6.50 4.00

Bar­illa Shells (4) 6.36 2.08

Grill­Mate Sea­son­ings (4) 5.40 2.00

Dole Fruit Cups (2) 6.98 2.00

Farmer John Franks (5) 16.45 0.00

Pop­cy­cles (2) 5.58 2.00

Cen­trum Vit­a­mins (1) 10.55 5.99

Best Food May­onase (2) 5.98 3.00

All Deter­gent (2) 13.98 4.98

Rotel Diced Toma­toes (4) 5.96 2.40

Nabisco Crack­ers (3) 11.97 4.00

Frenches Mus­tard (3) 5.97 0.00

Hunts Spagetti Sauce (6) 7.74 2.94

Always Pads (2) 6.38 2.00

Marathon Pro­tein Bars (4) 7.88 3.38

Twix Candy Bars (4) 5.16 2.00

Sub Total 190.79 54.72

Dou­ble Coupons 4.00

$10 off 10.00

Total 40.72

As you can see from this list I bought mul­ti­ples of each item and we store every­thing until we need it, if I had paid the retail prices for these things I would have paid $190.79 over the few months that we would use them, but because I pur­chased when they were on sale and I had coupons I saved almost $150 and got many of the items for free. Because of break­ing my trips into $50 seg­ments I usu­ally make 3–5 trips to get max­i­mum savings.

Once my stock shop­ping is com­plete we then go to WinCo each week for the items we need to round out our menu, fresh milk, veg­eta­bles, & fruit, usu­ally spend­ing under $20. At this point I might just buy the items that we need when I do the stock shop­ping if it is only a few items.

So, now I have bud­geted $600 a month for gro­ceries. I am spend­ing $300-$400 on the gro­ceries. The rest now is my vaca­tion or cruise fund, sav­ing around $3000 a year for us to use for a vaca­tion or cruise. I admit that when I do the shop­ping it takes me a few hours, and I spend a few hours in front of the TV cut­ting coupons, but sav­ing $200-$300 a month on gro­ceries that I can use for a vaca­tion or cruise is worth it.