Kitchen Tips: Use A Shopping List

Pre-holiday check lists shouldn’t be the only shopping lists in your life. By creating a shopping list which you can refer to week by week can cut down on time, money and even weight. There are a few different ways to compile the list – do you go by item location in the store, price ascendancy, order of importance or whatever?

That’s your preference but either way it all works out the same, ultimately you will benefit from taking the time to prepare a list and the satisfaction of ticking everything off that list, only adds to the overall shopping experience.

Cheaper

Once you’re confident with your ‘need’ and ‘luxury’ list you can budget yourself accordingly. So, if you’re overall budget was £160 and your ‘need’ list comes to £100 – you know you have £60 to spend on luxuries or, not spend at all and add to your savings account instead.

Get into the habit of collecting everything from your ‘need’ list into the trolley first and look at the second-lap around the store for luxuries, as a reward. Because you know, and stick to, your budget you can’t get a surprise at the till.

Note: Sometimes, because of in-store offers your ‘need’ list will come to less than your estimates, leaving more cash for goodies.

Another cost-reducing tactic is to reassess the list per week after trying out cheaper, alternative brands. If you discover the cheaper branded bread (for example) is just as nice as the premium make, then your budget can be adjusted and the money saved can be used towards something else.

Of course, if your total budget is too high and you want to bring it down instead of simply spending it in different areas of the supermarket – then your ‘luxury’ list needs to be addressed.
You could split the list in half and treat your prioritised luxuries as a kind of ‘sub-need’ register or eradicate all items from the list altogether.

Note: By rounding each item up to the nearest pound earlier, you will have inevitably overestimated how much you spend per week. Overestimation is good as it provides an undisclosed cushion for price inflation over time.

Health

If you’re concerned about your health, then a well prepared shopping list can help with this too. Add to the list the nutritional information from each product as you take them out of the bags when you get home.

Now, instead of a financial budget, refer to your guideline daily amounts (GDA). As a quick rule, multiply your GDAs by seven and that’s your rough, weekly health budget. Check the nutritional information on your shopping list against it and try and stay within that ‘budget’.

Note: The GDAx7 is not an official medical guideline and shouldn’t be used instead of the normal GDA. Just because a packet of biscuits has fewer calories than your GDAx7, it does not mean you could eat them all in one day and wait until next week for another feast.

Of course, this is more difficult to do if you’re shopping for more people than just yourself.
However, this is just one way a shopping list can aid a healthy lifestyle:
Another way is to analyse which products in your ‘need’ list are carrying a lot of grams and trying to substitute them for alternatives (e.g. butter for margarine).

Also, you could try taking the same list to different supermarket chains and comparing the nutritional differences. Whereas it’s unlikely there will be much variation, you may find one supermarket has more healthy foods in stock than another.

By: HRPub

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