My husband and I love to travel. However, we rarely pay more than half of what the retail price is for airfare, hotels, and car rental. How? Well, here are some simple ways we save:

1)      Order Online.

We’ve done a lot of comparing and have found that you can almost always beat the prices you’d get over the phone or through a travel agency if you purchase airfare, hotel rooms, or car rental online. Some of our favorite sites to use are: Hotwire.com, Orbitz.com, and Travelocity.com.

Each site is a bit different and will offer you different rates and options. When we are making travel arrangements, we always check all three sites to compare prices and options.

Do note that some travel sites add the tax already into the final price shown and others don’t add this in until you checkout. Make sure that you know if there are any extra fees which will be added in when you’re comparing prices.

2)      Choose a Package Deal.

You will usually save a substantial amount of money by purchasing airfare, hotel rooms, and car rental as a package deal. In fact, it’s usually a savings of 50% or more off the retail price to go this route. And sometimes, it’s even greater savings than that!

Even if you don’t really need to rent a car, but it would be nice to have, it’s worth checking into. Many times, you’ll actually save money by renting a car—as opposed to just getting a hotel and flight package.

3)      Be Flexible with Dates and Times.

The more flexible you are, the more possibilities there are for you to score a great discount. When you’re searching online for deals, I recommend inputting different dates and times to see if there is a significant price difference. Oftentimes, just being willing to go 12-24 hours sooner or later, you’ll be able to save $300 or more per person on a package deal.

4)      Use a Coupon Code.

When you’ve chosen which package deal you’re interested in, do a quick search for a coupon code. You can find these codes listed on Cash Back sites like ShopAtHome. You can’t always find a coupon code for the travel site you’re booking through, but it’s worth checking on if it will save you $50—as the coupon codes often do!

5)      Shop Through a Cashback Site.

After you’ve compared prices, found the best package deal, and applied a coupon code, the final way to save is to shop through a cashback site. Do not overlook this important savings tip! Considering that most travel packages are around $300 or more per person and ShopAtHome offers at least 1-3% cashback on orders through Orbitz.com, Travelocity.com, and Hotwire.com, your cashback earnings on travel purchases can quickly add up to a nice little bonus savings!

We’ve covered a variety of topics in this Feeding Our Family for $40 a Week series—from menu-planning to using coupons to  buying ahead. Today we’re going to talk about one final key ingredient to keeping our grocery budget low: cooking from scratch.

While shopping the sales and using coupons allows us to get many products for pennies on the dollar, we save hundreds of dollars each year by baking and cooking from scratch.

Many people assume that from-scratch cooking has to equal dozens of hours each week slaving in the kitchen. On the contrary, it actually can be done with minimal effort.

1) Use a bread machine.

We love homemade bread and cinnamon rolls, but I don’t have hours to devote to this each week. Instead, my bread machine has become one of best kitchen friends!

I rarely use the bread machine to bake the bread, but I constantly am using the dough cycle on it. In less than five minutes, I can have a loaf of bread started. The bread machine does the rest of the work. All I have to do is pull the dough out and stick it in a pan to bake

See our favorite Bread Machine Bread recipe here. We also love this recipe for Bread Machine Buttery Rolls and this fabulous Bread Machine Cinnamon Rolls recipe.

2) Cook in bulk.

While once-a-month cooking might intimidate you, cooking ahead really doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Start small: triple a casserole recipe, eat one for dinner, and stick two in the freezer. Or, mix up a double batch of your favorite cookie dough and freeze half of it in cookie dough balls.

Set aside one day a week to prepare food ahead of time and you’ll save a lot of time and a lot of money. Plus, homemade food trumps boxed and processed food every time!

You can see some of my freezer cooking recipes and successes and failures here.

3) Keep it simple.

Cooking from scratch doesn’t mean you have to have six course dinners every night. I recommend keeping it simple. Find some quick and easy recipes with only a few ingredients and stick to those most of the time.

We’ll often have some Italian Chicken (a bottle of your favorite Italian Dressing poured over chicken breasts and baked in the oven or crockpot), steamed veggies, fruit, and homemade bread (made in the bread machine) for dinner. This whole meal can be put together in less than 20 minutes. It’s nothing elaborate, but it’s filling, healthful, and delicious.

Who says homemade has to take hours?

So far in this series on how we only pay $40 per week for our family’s groceries, I’ve shared how I plan a menu based upon what’s on sale and what we have on hand, shop once a week or less, and shop at more than one store (missed the first two parts? Check them out here and here!) Today, I want to tell you about one of the biggest ways we are able to keep our grocery budget so low:

Use coupons.

Many times, people pass coupons off as a waste of time because they only see them as a way to save a quarter on over-priced name brands. I completely disagree. If you know how to use coupons properly, you can save hundreds—maybe even thousands!—of dollars per year on items you need and use.

In addition to being able to buy products for pennies on the dollar by matching coupons with sales, oftentimes, you’ll be able to get items free or almost-free. This is a wonderful way to be able to donate food to the needy—even on a limited budget!

How do you accumulate a nice stash of coupons? Well, there are many different ways to do so:

1) Subscribe to your local newspaper. This is the simplest way to get started couponing–getting it delivered to your door every week! Unless you already get the paper, I suggest not paying more than $2/week for your subscription, otherwise the price of the paper can negate your coupon savings.

2) Ask friends, relatives, and co-workers for their extra papers. Let it be known that you are an avid couponer and will gladly accept any extra coupon inserts from anyone who doesn’t use them. You might be surprised how many you can collect this way. Elderly neighbors seem to be especially eager to save their coupons for others, so be sure to ask them. Also, if you know of anyone who has a newspaper route, this might be another avenue for having access to free coupons. It depends upon the policy of the newspaper company, but sometimes they will allow you to have the extras.

3) Check out your local recycling bin. I’d heard of this method for awhile but never investigated it until a few years ago. Let me tell you, it really works! In fact, I don’t pay for a newspaper subscription because I am able to get so many coupon inserts for free from our local recycle bin!

I hit some very clean newspaper recycling bins on my way home from the store every few weeks and in 15 minutes, I can usually salvage 10-15 coupon inserts!

4) Get coupons at the store. Keep your eyes peeled at the store and pick up any coupons you find on tearpads or in the blinking dispensers. If there are extras, pick up multiple copies of these. A lot of times, this very item will be on an exceptional sale just a few weeks later and you’ll be more than glad you picked up that handful of coupons!

5) Print coupons out online. If your store accepts “printables,” this can be a great source of coupons. You can do a search for “printable coupons” and it will bring up many different coupons. You can also search for a specific item and see if there are any printable coupons. Most of these sites allow you to print two coupons per computer every few weeks. The coupons offered on these sites usually change every month. Go here to see some of the best current printable coupons available.

6) Write and ask for coupons. What are some of your favorite products which you routinely use? Write to the manufacturer, tell them how much you like their product, and politely request that they send you any coupons they have available. It only takes a few minutes to send an email to a company and you’ll likely get some sort of coupons just for asking—often high-value coupons or even coupons for free products!

There are also many other options for obtaining coupons like trading coupons with others online or offline or coupon trading boxes available at some stores or libraries, and other ways. Start actively looking for coupons and you’ll soon find more sources than you can use!

The key to using coupons wisely is knowing when and how to use them. You don’t just buy the paper and cut out all the coupons in it and use them the next time you shop. Instead, I recommend waiting until an item is already reduced by 50% or more and then pairing it with a coupon.

If you’re getting the item for 75% to 90% off the retail price, it’s less expensive than the generic brand, and it’s something you routinely use, then it’s very likely what I could consider a “good deal”.  However, do be careful not to get so excited about how much you’re saving that you forget to take into account how much you are spending. If you saved 90% off your grocery bill, but you spent $60 on items you won’t probably use and don’t need, it really wasn’t that great of savings, was it?

Practice and observation are really the keys to learning what is a good deal for your area. You might find it helpful to keep a price book and track the lowest price you’re able to get on an item over the course of six months or a year. That way, you’ll know the next time when a sale paired with a coupon is truly a good deal.

If you’re just not sure if couponing is really worth your time, go here to see some of my recent grocery shopping trips where I’ve snagged dozens of bargains for pennies on the dollar thanks to coupons.

Want to learn more about significantly cutting your grocery bill by using coupons? Be sure to subscribe to my free email newsletter to get the latest scoop on current deals and freebies and listen to my free podcasts here and here.

I’m honored to have the opportunity to guest post here again! Last month, I introduced my family and shared how planning a menu based upon what we have on hand and what is on sale at the store is a way we see significant savings in our grocery budget every month. Today, I want to share a few more tips which allow us to keep our grocery budget to $40 per week:

3) Shop once a week or less.

It might seem like a complete no-brainer, but the simple act of limiting your trips to the store to once a week or less can result in big savings. I don’t know about you, but I’ve found that the more I shop, the more I buy. The more I stay home, the less money I spend and the more I make-do with what we have.

If you are in the habit of making multiple trips to the store each week, start challenging yourself to hold out between trips. Ask yourself if you really need the item you were running to the store for, or if you could come up with an alternative with something else you already have at home.

Fewer trips to the store will save you time and money. And they will also encourage you to make sure and buy everything you need in your once-a-week shopping trip. Which, by the way, is why menu-planning and grocery-list-making are so important if you also want to cut down on trips to the store. (See the tips posted last time for more help with menu-planning and grocery-list-making.)

4) Shop at more than one store.

I try to only make one shopping trip per week, but I don’t limit myself to one store. Why? Because I save at least $15-$20 almost every single week by shopping at multiple stores!

It might seem like extra work—and it is!—but for a little bit of time invested each week, we save every penny of $750 to $1000 per year. That’s worth it, in my opinion.

When I’m planning my menu and grocery shopping trip, I quickly glance through the ads for all the stores in our area and determine which one has the best sales that week and then plan my shopping trip accordingly. There are five different stores I shop at regularly, but I usually only hit two of them per week—based upon which has the best sales.

You can usually find your grocery store’s ads online if you don’t receive them in your weekly mail. However, I’ve found it is much more helpful if you can also find a blog or two which lists a round-up each week of the best deals at your local stores. If someone has already done the work for you, there’s no point in you also doing it yourself!

If you don’t know of a blog which lists deals for your local stores, I recommend doing a Google search with your store name(s) and “deal blog” or similar variations to find bloggers who are posting in-depth lists of deals and sales at your local grocery store chains. These bloggers usually have printable coupons listed right along with the deals which saves you even more time and money!

Next time, we’ll talk about two of my biggest tips for sticking with a $40-per-week grocery budget. Stay tuned!

Hello ShopAtHome Blog Readers! I’m honored to have the privilege of doing occasional guest posting here over the next few months.

Today, I’m going to share with you some of our family’s secrets to feeding our family on $40 a week. Yes, I really just said $40 per week. And no, we’re not starving or living on Ramen. In fact, we eat quite a healthful and varied diet and only spend $40 per week maximum at the grocery store. (You can see some of our weekly menu plans here.)

But before I dive into the details, let me back up and introduce myself. I’m Crystal Paine, also known as Money Saving Mom, and am married to my wonderful husband Jesse and am mother to three precious little ones.

I’ve always been a frugal zealot, but when my husband and I got married almost seven years ago, my frugality had to be taken to a whole new level as we scrimped to make it through three years of law school without debt. During those years, I learned quite a few new and creative ways to maximize the mileage of what little money we had. And one area I found we could really pinch pennies in was our grocery budget.

Because of the things I learned during our lean law school years, we now are able to feed our family of five on $40 a week. I could write a whole book on how we do it, but in this series, I’ll just share a few simple tips which anyone can use if you want to see significant savings on your grocery bill:

1)      Plan a menu.

If you don’t have a plan, you’re naturally going to spend more money. Taking 15 to 30 minutes each week to write down a menu plan could save you $30 or more per week. That’s like getting paid at least $1-$2 per minute for the time spent planning!

If you’re new to menu-planning, it’s really not as hard as it might seem. You can find some comprehensive articles on the subject here, here, and here.

2)      Plan your menu based upon what you have on hand and what is on sale at the store.

Once you feel comfortable with menu-planning, it’s time to take it up another notch. Save even more money by using your cupboards, refrigerator, pantry, and freezer as the starting point for your weekly meal plan.

If you open up your freezer and see you have chicken and frozen broccoli and you open up your cupboard and see a bag of rice, you have the beginnings of Chicken Broccoli Rice Casserole. Just add cheese and cream of chicken soup to your grocery list and you have everything you need for one dinner that week.

Or maybe you find you have a roast and a bag of potatoes. Buy some carrots and you can make Roast, Potatoes, and Carrots in the crockpot.

One great resource for coming up with recipes based upon what you already have on hand is by using the Ingredient Search feature from AllRecipes. Type in the ingredients you have and those you don’t have, and it will pull up a list of recipes you can make.

Two other websites you can consult for recipes based upon ingredients you have on hand are SuperCook and Recipe Matcher.

Once you feel like you’re getting the hang of planning your menu based upon what you have on hand, I recommend that you start consulting your store’s sale fliers, too. Most grocery store chains have their weekly sale fliers available online. When you’re in the middle of planning your menu and grocery list, quickly browse through these sale fliers and see if there are any exceptional deals on things you need or things you will use in the next few months.

Much of the time, the best deals stores are running will be listed on the front page. However, be aware that just because something is listed in the sales flier it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a great deal. As you become more familiar with grocery store sales, you’ll start to learn when items are at their rock-bottom prices. We’ll talk more about this in Part 2.

To be continued…