Use Your Grocery Receipt as a Cue to Save ∞ Get Rich Slowly

Reader R. McCall forwarded a syndicated piece from Humberto Cruz:

“Finding creative ways to save” discusses the importance of building an emergency fund, offers a fun way to do so, and then refers to a contest sponsored by the Consumer Federation.

This is a variation on the wife’s favorite money hack, rounding up to the next dollar. That earlier tip didn’t sit well with some readers who thought she was just deceiving herself. (She’s not.) This variation should meet with more universal approval.

At the grocery store, the cashier dutifully informs you of all the money you’ve saved with the store specials. “You saved $6.45 today,” she proclaims, pointing to the highlighted figure on the receipt.

You may not give this much thought, considering the whole thing smacks of showmanship and specials are meant to get you into the store so you buy other stuff, too. But a few savings-minded readers have told me that, the minute they get home, they put in a cookie jar an amount similar to what they saved.

When the jar is full, they deposit the money in their savings account. After months and sometimes years of doing this, they have balances in the hundreds and even thousands of dollars.

Nice trick. The rest of the article provides more information about saving, and, as McCall mentioned, provides info about a contest sponsored by the Consumer Federation in which the winner will receive a savings bond. If you have a money hack, sent it to .

[Milwaukee Journal: Finding creative ways to save]

Keith T. Says:
March 12th, 2007 at 1:22 pm

Some banks have formed programs which do exactly this — add up the remainder of cents from your debit/credit transactions over the course of the day, and transfer that sum into your savings account. Wells Fargo and Bank of America have this — at BOA it’s called “Keep The Change”. Avid card users can find anywhere from $1 to $5 or so a day or weekend (I’ve had one drop of over $10) siphoned into their savings accounts this way.

Gwyn Says:
March 12th, 2007 at 1:41 pm

What we do is to keep an accurate budget (using PearBudget) each month of what we spend and receive. At the end of the month, we work out the excess (receipts - expenses) and that amount goes into the savings. It’s usually a pretty good amount of about 500 a month.

Will Tomkinson Says:
March 12th, 2007 at 2:29 pm

After a long and exciting road cleaning up our personal finances, my wife an I startes using a lot of the skills we had learned here, other PF blogs and else where and applied it to our grocery bill. We had noticed big increases in grocery expenses when we stopped eating out at restaurants and started bringing lunches to work.

Using coupons, sales and flyers it si easy to save approximately 10%-12.5% on EVERY grocery bill. This weekend, we did a shop and saved 34.2% on the total! Gasp. It was worth having to snip or print coupons and scour the flyers.

Kevin M Says:
March 13th, 2007 at 1:55 pm

/sarcasm/ So I should spend $10,000 at the grocery store tonight so my “You Saved:” at the bottom of the receipt is in the hundreds or thousands?

Sorry, not a productive comment, but first thing that came to my head. There -are- limits…