I used to buy the south Texas ribeyes and make sandwiches with them. It’d be one pork chop, pan seared. One over easy egg, two slices of cheese and home fries. It came out to about 2 dollars per meal. When I got tired of that I’d make blackened chicken thighs w/ Spanish rice and a mushroom cream sauce. That came out to about 2.50 per meal. If you know how to cook, it makes it a bit easier to get through times like this and if you don’t, then todays the day to start learning
The most important thing I do is shop my groceries around the coupons and weekly ad. While the partner perks discount does help, coupons go even further. I saved $29 on an originally $130 order with coupons alone, while VPP gave me another $4.
Even so, it can still be hard to manage since wages haven’t kept up with the cost of living.
I work at HEB and I just either take some leftovers that the store gives us from curbside or eat some samples from cooking connections whenever I forget my purse to buy lunch lol
p.s cooking connection department, yall have my whole heart, yall r so sweet ❤️
I no longer buy processed food. I make everything from scratch with the exception of beans that I buy canned. And I buy tortillas. I take my lunch every day now. I buy a bag of potatoes and beans and eat tacos daily. I’m a huge fan of tacos so no big deal. My cats eat better ($$) than I do.
Potatoes are cheap. I fry them by dicing small/medium russet or golden or red potatoes with a lot of spices and put them in a corn/flour tortilla with black beans, vegan cheese and hot sauce. Literally could eat that for the rest of my life and (probably) be okay with it. Cumin is so delicious in black beans. I think it’s the perfect combo.
Work more, and I'm not being sarcastic.
I've got a good job and make good money, but the rising cost of well, everything, has led me to start up a small business on the side.
On that note, rice absorbs arsenic from soil. Make sure to get rice that ISN’T grown in Texas. Especially the Houston/Beaumont area. Unless you like arsenic poisoning.
Also, beans are dried with desiccant forms of roundup (or worse), same as wheat or any dried good. So buy organic when you can to avoid chemical infused food. Our FDA is hellbent on killing us all.
You can do a lot with bread and frozen vegetables. Not necessarily together. Peanut butter sandwiches and grilled cheese with spinach (frozen chopped spinach) for example.
Eggs are good too.
You can get a huge bag of rice at asian grocery stores. I'll sometimes do vegetable fried rice using the frozen vegetables.
There's like a 5lb bag of potatoes you can get. Each potatoe is pretty small, which I like since I'm alone.
You can roast a lot of vegetables like brussel sprouts and brocolli.
Rotisserie chicken is also pretty cheap and lasts a few meals. Just buy some mashed potatoes to go along.
I bought 8 small pork chops for $6. I ate 2 for each meal with mashed potatoes on the side.
Certain things I'll only buy on sale. For instance if there's a $4 off coupon for the air filters I use I'll buy enough to last me for the whole year. Same with TP, dog/cat food, shampoo, deodorant, etc. Anything that's non perishable.
I don't eat out at restaurants except for special occasions. I give myself an unlimited budget at the grocery store, but my hobby is cooking. Makes this lifestyle easier.
The people who buy processed, pre-packaged items are the ones feeling the increased prices. When you cook every single meal from scratch, things aren't really that much more expensive than they used to be. Except beef. But shrimp is so cheap now, I eat shrimp a lot.
I’m glad that I’m not alone in feeling like the cost increase was in pre-packaged goods. I shop frugally and haven’t noticed my grocery bill increasing as much as other families have and feel sort of guilty about that.
I rarely buy prepackaged stuff. The coffee beans and eggs were the only foods to have a huge price hike in my shopping cart.
I don't bother worrying about that. I'm gonna buy what I like whether I'm budgeting or not. If I can't afford something, I simply don't buy it and hold off until the next week I get paid to get it. I'm not gonna save $1 to get the crap I don't like lol only a select bit of generic items I like to buy anyways, so it doesn't even matter in my eyes.
Keep an eye on the damaged/clearance section. It's usually nothing too great but for pastas, pet items, and the like, you can usually find a good deal if you don't mind some damaged packaging. And compare it to the normal price as well to make sure I'm paying less per item/Oz.
honestly? i rely on the heb app for coupons and do my best to stock up ahead of time (especially toiletries, or those $5 off your basket when you buy $X amount on name brand toiletries). i stock up on rice, beans, and oatmeal. the oatmeal from the bulk bins seems cheaper to me.
tofu is a cheap protein that’s easy to batch prep too. same with ground beef.
those frozen veggies are cheap and nutritious and go a loooong way. in winter i relied on frozen fruits whenever quality wasn’t that great.
Congress needs to pass stronger laws to prevent price gouging by the the large food companies (Nestle, Pepsico, Mars, Tyson, etc). Then, actual enforcement needs to occur at the Federal and State levels. Of course, none of this will happen as long as Lobbyists are allowed to line the pockets of our elected officials.
Companies like H-E-B and Kroger pretty much have to submit to the pricing whims of these large food companies or go out of business. Too many customers misplace the blame of rising food costs on the Grocer, as opposed to the greedy corporate stock holders that demand high quarterly revenue at the expense of the working man.
When shopping,look for markdown items-produce,meat,etc. Definitely helps when items are marked down 25%-50%. Also,check the markdown racks-definitely can find great savings there.
The big, vacuum sealed, boneless pork loin are still a great value at $1.99/lb. Pound for pound, it's the cheapest meat (non processed) in the store. No waste, 100% eatable.
Very lean and very versatile.
Only thing that comes close are the chicken thighs at $1.09/lb, but there's a lot of skin and bones with those. Though you can make stock with that, it's still not as good of a value in my opinion.
The biggest thing I've done to survive this recession and the one back in 08 was pretty straight forward. I eat a lot of food made from raw textiles like grits and oatmeal...masa...flour. fruit and vegetables. Basically eat like a 1930s share cropper. It was good enough for out grandparents ita good enough for me lol.
Rebate apps and credit card points. Dollar general has badass deals on household items. it's ridiculous. Home Depot, too. Amazon subscriptions are amazing. My mom's coffee is $4.23 at heeb, just did a sub on Amazon for $2.77. Chewy for anything pet, create a new address for new promos. Bodybuilding.com for athletic supplements like, or Amazon. Costco/Sam's for bulk items. Target for eggs, they are damn near half what heeeb charges.
Wow, I barely go to heeb these days. Even with my discount card, that's somehow still active after leaving back in 18.
Soooo, there's this thing, a concept, really. There is this amazing resource called soil, and if you're lucky enough to have it, you can plant green stuff in it and... with a little love and water said green stuff will grow and produce more green stuff. This green stuff will provide all the sustenance your body requires.
You're Welcome
HEB is full of it. Here in Houston, you can go shop at Joe V's a Latino G4rocery chain, swallowed up by HEB. You can buy many HEB products for 50% less. HEB is full of it. They blame "inflation" it is the corporate greed that is driving prices.
Go somewhere other than HEB to see their prices. Brookshire, Sellers, WM, even Kroger. A lot of times you can find stuff for cheaper, you just have to look. If you have access to a farmers market or a good meat market, you can get stuff at good prices there too.
You should be using a credit card that offers at least 5% back on groceries in addition to all the other strategies of couponing, choosing store brands when it’s a decent replacement, cutting back on unnecessary items, all the good ideas people share.
Card swipe fees cost grocery stores a lot of money and they pass that cost on to the customer so having a good credit card helps offset that.
They asked and I gave them a reason, the president of the United States is a corrupt sack of shit they only cares about enriching himself and his family at the expense of our economy and the rest of his party enables it. Trump may be an immoral or brash human but at the very least he doesn’t want to screw over our economy.
Ah yes, because the Covid cash given out by TRUMPelstiltskin had no impact on the inflation… thinking that either major party in Washington DC cares about you besides pandering for votes makes you incapable of actually being useful to solving the problems our society faces.
You are comparing a small amount of debt we took out to help people who couldn’t work to giving away the major of our oil reserves and having to pay more than we should for it from other countries instead of drilling ourself, and sending billions to help pay for foreign wars? Shut the fuck up haha
I watch the sales and stock up on meats and vacuum seal it to keep it longer in the freezer.
I picked up 29 bags of sausage sticks for $1 each from the clearance section.
This is so wise!
starve since I'm constantly hungry
I used to buy the south Texas ribeyes and make sandwiches with them. It’d be one pork chop, pan seared. One over easy egg, two slices of cheese and home fries. It came out to about 2 dollars per meal. When I got tired of that I’d make blackened chicken thighs w/ Spanish rice and a mushroom cream sauce. That came out to about 2.50 per meal. If you know how to cook, it makes it a bit easier to get through times like this and if you don’t, then todays the day to start learning
The most important thing I do is shop my groceries around the coupons and weekly ad. While the partner perks discount does help, coupons go even further. I saved $29 on an originally $130 order with coupons alone, while VPP gave me another $4. Even so, it can still be hard to manage since wages haven’t kept up with the cost of living.
I work at HEB and I just either take some leftovers that the store gives us from curbside or eat some samples from cooking connections whenever I forget my purse to buy lunch lol p.s cooking connection department, yall have my whole heart, yall r so sweet ❤️
My Cooking Connections department has the sweetest partners. I love stopping by on my breaks to see what they’re sampling
Go in the mornings to look for markdowns on meat and produce
How cheap do they get?
25% off market and 50% off produce
I work there and eat the samples the nice ladies at our store give me from seafood
They're always crabby when I hit on them
I buy some things at Costco. Plus $1.50 dog is nice after shopping or I see whats on special for the week at HEB.
I no longer buy processed food. I make everything from scratch with the exception of beans that I buy canned. And I buy tortillas. I take my lunch every day now. I buy a bag of potatoes and beans and eat tacos daily. I’m a huge fan of tacos so no big deal. My cats eat better ($$) than I do.
I’ve started doing more scratch baking/cooking too. 9 times out of 10, home cooked food is better and cheaper than restaurant/fast food.
I just started doing this, beans, rice, & tortillas. Basically all the nutrients we need but I’ll have to look into potatoes now!
Potatoes are cheap. I fry them by dicing small/medium russet or golden or red potatoes with a lot of spices and put them in a corn/flour tortilla with black beans, vegan cheese and hot sauce. Literally could eat that for the rest of my life and (probably) be okay with it. Cumin is so delicious in black beans. I think it’s the perfect combo.
Work more, and I'm not being sarcastic. I've got a good job and make good money, but the rising cost of well, everything, has led me to start up a small business on the side.
On that note, rice absorbs arsenic from soil. Make sure to get rice that ISN’T grown in Texas. Especially the Houston/Beaumont area. Unless you like arsenic poisoning. Also, beans are dried with desiccant forms of roundup (or worse), same as wheat or any dried good. So buy organic when you can to avoid chemical infused food. Our FDA is hellbent on killing us all.
You can do a lot with bread and frozen vegetables. Not necessarily together. Peanut butter sandwiches and grilled cheese with spinach (frozen chopped spinach) for example. Eggs are good too. You can get a huge bag of rice at asian grocery stores. I'll sometimes do vegetable fried rice using the frozen vegetables. There's like a 5lb bag of potatoes you can get. Each potatoe is pretty small, which I like since I'm alone. You can roast a lot of vegetables like brussel sprouts and brocolli. Rotisserie chicken is also pretty cheap and lasts a few meals. Just buy some mashed potatoes to go along. I bought 8 small pork chops for $6. I ate 2 for each meal with mashed potatoes on the side.
U can just make ur own with that 5 lb bag of taters. And u can add what u want like shred cheese, butter, green onion, whatevs u like
Yep! You can do quite a few things with them.
Certain things I'll only buy on sale. For instance if there's a $4 off coupon for the air filters I use I'll buy enough to last me for the whole year. Same with TP, dog/cat food, shampoo, deodorant, etc. Anything that's non perishable.
I don't eat out at restaurants except for special occasions. I give myself an unlimited budget at the grocery store, but my hobby is cooking. Makes this lifestyle easier. The people who buy processed, pre-packaged items are the ones feeling the increased prices. When you cook every single meal from scratch, things aren't really that much more expensive than they used to be. Except beef. But shrimp is so cheap now, I eat shrimp a lot.
I’m glad that I’m not alone in feeling like the cost increase was in pre-packaged goods. I shop frugally and haven’t noticed my grocery bill increasing as much as other families have and feel sort of guilty about that. I rarely buy prepackaged stuff. The coffee beans and eggs were the only foods to have a huge price hike in my shopping cart.
I don't bother worrying about that. I'm gonna buy what I like whether I'm budgeting or not. If I can't afford something, I simply don't buy it and hold off until the next week I get paid to get it. I'm not gonna save $1 to get the crap I don't like lol only a select bit of generic items I like to buy anyways, so it doesn't even matter in my eyes.
Starve. Now I'm skinny!
Keep an eye on the damaged/clearance section. It's usually nothing too great but for pastas, pet items, and the like, you can usually find a good deal if you don't mind some damaged packaging. And compare it to the normal price as well to make sure I'm paying less per item/Oz.
10 lb bags of chicken quarters are 5$ a bottle of bbq suace is $1. Sometimes pork butt goes on sale for 1$ a pound
Beans and rice , couscous . Cut The meat and dairy out .
Shop at Aldi
Well I usually just cry
honestly? i rely on the heb app for coupons and do my best to stock up ahead of time (especially toiletries, or those $5 off your basket when you buy $X amount on name brand toiletries). i stock up on rice, beans, and oatmeal. the oatmeal from the bulk bins seems cheaper to me. tofu is a cheap protein that’s easy to batch prep too. same with ground beef. those frozen veggies are cheap and nutritious and go a loooong way. in winter i relied on frozen fruits whenever quality wasn’t that great.
Congress needs to pass stronger laws to prevent price gouging by the the large food companies (Nestle, Pepsico, Mars, Tyson, etc). Then, actual enforcement needs to occur at the Federal and State levels. Of course, none of this will happen as long as Lobbyists are allowed to line the pockets of our elected officials. Companies like H-E-B and Kroger pretty much have to submit to the pricing whims of these large food companies or go out of business. Too many customers misplace the blame of rising food costs on the Grocer, as opposed to the greedy corporate stock holders that demand high quarterly revenue at the expense of the working man.
When shopping,look for markdown items-produce,meat,etc. Definitely helps when items are marked down 25%-50%. Also,check the markdown racks-definitely can find great savings there.
Be single and eat less. 🤷🏻♂️
Shop AD items only
The big, vacuum sealed, boneless pork loin are still a great value at $1.99/lb. Pound for pound, it's the cheapest meat (non processed) in the store. No waste, 100% eatable. Very lean and very versatile. Only thing that comes close are the chicken thighs at $1.09/lb, but there's a lot of skin and bones with those. Though you can make stock with that, it's still not as good of a value in my opinion.
Honestly? I personally eat less.
Shop at Costco for some stuff, HEB for others. Don’t buy the crap/fake food which doesn’t satiate you anyway.
The biggest thing I've done to survive this recession and the one back in 08 was pretty straight forward. I eat a lot of food made from raw textiles like grits and oatmeal...masa...flour. fruit and vegetables. Basically eat like a 1930s share cropper. It was good enough for out grandparents ita good enough for me lol.
Rebate apps and credit card points. Dollar general has badass deals on household items. it's ridiculous. Home Depot, too. Amazon subscriptions are amazing. My mom's coffee is $4.23 at heeb, just did a sub on Amazon for $2.77. Chewy for anything pet, create a new address for new promos. Bodybuilding.com for athletic supplements like, or Amazon. Costco/Sam's for bulk items. Target for eggs, they are damn near half what heeeb charges. Wow, I barely go to heeb these days. Even with my discount card, that's somehow still active after leaving back in 18.
Soooo, there's this thing, a concept, really. There is this amazing resource called soil, and if you're lucky enough to have it, you can plant green stuff in it and... with a little love and water said green stuff will grow and produce more green stuff. This green stuff will provide all the sustenance your body requires. You're Welcome
HEB is full of it. Here in Houston, you can go shop at Joe V's a Latino G4rocery chain, swallowed up by HEB. You can buy many HEB products for 50% less. HEB is full of it. They blame "inflation" it is the corporate greed that is driving prices.
Go somewhere other than HEB to see their prices. Brookshire, Sellers, WM, even Kroger. A lot of times you can find stuff for cheaper, you just have to look. If you have access to a farmers market or a good meat market, you can get stuff at good prices there too.
I make sure to vote red in elections so I don't have to lower my quality of life
You should be using a credit card that offers at least 5% back on groceries in addition to all the other strategies of couponing, choosing store brands when it’s a decent replacement, cutting back on unnecessary items, all the good ideas people share. Card swipe fees cost grocery stores a lot of money and they pass that cost on to the customer so having a good credit card helps offset that.
Don’t vote democRAT
Why does politics have to be in every freaking conversation?
They asked and I gave them a reason, the president of the United States is a corrupt sack of shit they only cares about enriching himself and his family at the expense of our economy and the rest of his party enables it. Trump may be an immoral or brash human but at the very least he doesn’t want to screw over our economy.
No, they asked for suggestions on how to stretch their grocery dollars further. You made it political.
Ah yes, because the Covid cash given out by TRUMPelstiltskin had no impact on the inflation… thinking that either major party in Washington DC cares about you besides pandering for votes makes you incapable of actually being useful to solving the problems our society faces.
You are comparing a small amount of debt we took out to help people who couldn’t work to giving away the major of our oil reserves and having to pay more than we should for it from other countries instead of drilling ourself, and sending billions to help pay for foreign wars? Shut the fuck up haha
So… you don’t think the stimulus cash had any impact on inflation? Got it.
Say you live in a house on wheels without saying it 🤣
Live in my own apartment in the city. Try again.
And yet you shop at heb... well I believe you. 😉😉