I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…

Plans to Buy in Bulk - The Readers Speak

A few weeks ago I wrote a post asking for help from my readers to figure out how to plan ahead to buy in bulk. Buying in bulk in the right way can save significant money in the long run, and apparently is actually an investment with a great rate of return, but I really struggle how to fit this bulk buying into my budget. I’ll have much more to say about that as time goes on. And the readers responded with all sorts of ideas and tips and strategies! I have formulated phase one of my bulk buying plan, which I’ll share over the upcoming few days, but I wanted to first highlight the super-helpful suggestions I got from many of the PaidTwice readers that made this possible.

BillJ shares two ideas:

This is where your emergency fund should kick in. I think most people want to leave that money in savings unless something truly awful happens (major car problem, huge medical expense, job loss). In fact, the best bet is to build up the emergency fund so it could cover 3-4 months worth of basic expenses, just in case.

But I think the emergency fund should also be your cushion that keeps you from living paycheck to paycheck. In fact, I’m going to call it the cushion fund from now on, just to keep us on track.

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The other alternative is to try to budget an amount for bulk items that is separate from your regular grocery budget. For instance, we go to Smart & Final (a local warehouse store like Sam’s Club or Costco, except without an annual fee) about once every month or so. When there, we buy large amounts of staples such as toilet paper, olive oil, and spices. (What an image!). If we’re good about regularly going to the warehouse store, we’ll see our regular grocery shopping expenses go down.

But I think it has to be a separate budget item. If I were being realistic, I’d say that we spend at one trip to the bulk warehouse store about half of what we normally spend on a regular trip to the grocery store.

Lynnae shares her past strategy:

I don’t buy in bulk much anymore, be cause we have a serious lack of storage space. In the past, I’ve cut the grocery budget to the bare bones and created a little surplus for myself. Then I’d use the surplus to buy stuff on sale.

It’s a hard thing to get started when you’re broke, but once you have a system going, it gets easier, because you’ll find you pretty much only buy things on sale.

Alison feels my pain too:

I have a lot of trouble with this too. Stocking up when something is on sale is one of the main reasons that I have trouble staying within my grocery budget. So I pretty much stopped buying in bulk, which for some reasons irks my husband. LOL In a perfect world, I’d tack on a food storage budget to each month and any time I’d really stock up on something it’d go into that category. But when I recently re-worked my budget, there was no money for that. Someday that’s what I’ll try though.

crazypumpkin has another idea:

In the beginning, I’d just suck it up and deal without something else in my food budget to buy the bulk items. But much of what I eat can’t be found in bulk (gluten free pasta), or I just can’t store it in bulk (fresh produce). I do buy my meat in bulk and now that I’ve been doing it for a while I’ll find that the closer I get to needing an item, the more extra money I have in my food envelope. And with buying bulk, I of course spend less overall, so I may even be able to lower my food budget and put a bit more into paying off the credit card.

Layla goes with the separate budget idea:

I have a special amount each month for things I buy in bulk at BJ’s. It’s not part of my normal grocery budget. I found I could then lower my grocery budget because I wasn’t buying those things at the regular grocery store anymore. Also, I try to only buy things on sale. So if it isn’t on sale, we aren’t eating it for dinner. This doesn’t always work but it does keep costs down. I find sometimes I spend over my weekly budget and under but in the end it usually works out for the monthly budget.

Rete does bulk buying as a budget “shift”:

I’m starting to buy in bulk as well, and what I did was added $20 to my monthly grocery budget (removed from our eating out budget since we’re trying not to do that as much to save money and lose weight), and each week I try to keep our necessities down to the bare minimum and any great deals I find up to that limit. As time goes on, our necessities should go down since I have a stockpile at home and free up more money for great deals I find in the future, so we’re always eating our meals at the absolute lowest price possible.

Heather built in bulk buying little by little:

I was in a similar situation when I started Sam’s club shopping. I had a membership card from my employer at the time (and although now I have moved on and have to pay for my own membership, after looking at the costs, it still saves me money yearly to have the card.) But, I digress.. This is how I started and stayed within my $150/two weeks grocery budget.

On the first shopping trip, I bought 1 thing (chicken breasts in my case), spending only about $20, but which lasted for almost 9 meals. And then did the rest of my shopping at the grocery store.

On the second shopping trip, I bought 4 things (beef, mac & cheese, green beans, corn) spending $40 (the same $20 out of my budget as the last time plus the $20 i would have been spending on chicken if I had to buy it at the grocery store again this week), all of which was enough to last about 2 months.

And I just kept going from there. Now every time I go grocery shopping, I spend approximately $75-100 at the warehouse store and $75-50 at the grocery store.

This are the two things to remember, DON’T buy it if you are not going to use it, and make sure that is is worth buying in bulk. Compare the per unit price to that of the regular grocery store. On a rare occasion, I have found one or two things where there is no benefit in buying in bulk (usually milk is similarly priced).

Mrs. Micah takes some of the above advice and distills it into a nice outline:

Quick idea outline:

1. Use money from your emergency fund to buy in bulk for a certain period, say 6 months.

2. Figure out how much that comes out to per month’s supply.

3. Add an item to your monthly budget “Pay back emergency fund for medicine” or somesuch equal to that month’s worth of medicine, from step 2.

After all the medicine is in your budget anyway, so you can afford to pay back LESS than it normally costs. Even frees up a little money.

That’s what I would do, but it might not work for you. Hope it’s helpful anyway.

Moms Finance has a bulk agreement with friends!

I buy in bulk quite a lot but I don’t rely on spare money all the time. I buy in bulk with my girlfriends. We’ll chat about specials we’ve seen and if possible organise our buying at the same time, getting the benefit of bulk buying but spreading the purchasing across several families.

And a reader emailed me her way of bulk buying:

I read a while back (I think it was Humberto Cruz’s syndicated column in the business section of my Sunday newspaper) that you should pad your grocery budget by 30%, and only use that 30% for items that are on sale, so you can buy extras without sacrificing the other items on your grocery list.

A budget category just for surplus is a good idea, too, if your system works better that way.

I usually pad the grocery budget and that works fine for me. I look at the grocery flyer as soon as it arrives and add the sale items I will use to my grocery list and put a “PC” (for purchase card) by those items. Once my grocery list is done, I decide the quantity of the PC items I can buy without breaking the budget. I am extremely disciplined when I shop, and I do not buy anything that is not on the list.

Thanks for all the ideas and suggestions! I’ve read and pondered and considered and thought and I’ve come up with a few ideas to implement myself. I’ll be writing more on that throughout the week. I hope if you’ve been thinking about how to buy in bulk you pick up some ideas from these fabulous comments and suggestions!

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