GREAT App for Frugality

Image from iTunes App Store

All you stay-at-home penny-pinching moms this is for you.  Many of you may have heard of a price notebook.  If you haven't here's a quick introduction.  It's a little notebook that you use to keep track of the prices of items in different grocery stores, so that you can get the BEST prices wherever and whenever you shop.

In a price notebook you have a table of contents in alphabetical order:

p. 1 Applesauce
p. 2 Asparagus
p. 3 Apples
etc.

After you go shopping you then enter items from your receipt into your price notebook as follows:

Motts Applesauce (Wegmans) 24 oz. $3.75
Alid Applesauce (Aldi) 12 oz. $1.25
Motts Applesauce (Sam's Club) 300 oz. $50.45
etc.

You then use the information to figure out the price per ounce!  We're going to do a little math here, but it's easy.  Just take the cost and divide it by the number of ounces and you have....the price per ounce!

$3.75/24 oz. = 0.156 cents/oz.
$1.25/12 oz. = 0.104 cents/oz.
$50.45/300 oz. = 0.168 cents/oz.

You can then compare and see which item is actually the cheapest.  I'll give you a hint, it's not going to be the same store for every item.  That's why you do this! (By-the-way I made up these examples, so don't rely on them!)

My mother has been keeping a price notebook for years.  When I'm not in "survival mode" (meaning pregnant, sick, or homeschooling) I also keep a price notebook.  I decided that there must be an online version and of course there is, but it's not called a price notebook.  It's called Cheapster.  It costs a whole $0.99, but you will soon save much more money than that using it, so it's totally worth the dollar I spent on it.

Cheapster has a homepage:

 Image from iTunes App Store

You just press the (+) sign and add items that you want to compare.  Then you go to that item and you can add individual items after shopping:

Image from iTunes App Store

It doesn't take long before you have quite a little collection of information on your Cheapster app.  Then, and this is the BEST PART, you can e-mail yourself the data so it won't get lost and/or e-mail it to your friends so they can know what the cheapest stuff around is.

The only drawbacks are that it doesn't record the date that you entered the information.  This can be important because prices change, and it's good to know when prices are really old.

So, I shop at 3 stores: Aldi, Wegmans, and Sam's Club.  There are things at each store that are cheaper than the other two.  I save lots of money using this app.  Try it!

Cheaply Yours,
cin