Saving money in college is hard. If you’re like me, you aren’t working nearly as many hours as you did in high school or even over the summer. With the little income you might be making, there are a thousand more expenses to deal with: textbooks, tuition payments, gas money, and activities with friends! It can be hard to balance it all. When you’re no longer on a meal plan, like me, you also have to budget out money for groceries. While there are a million ways to save money on groceries, many of them take a lot of time or a lot of printing. Unfortuntately, I can’t waste my printing allowance on printing coupons, but I have learned many ways to save money on groceries!
1. Get a store card
This is the easiest thing to do. Sign up for a Big Y and/ or Price Chopper card. It’s free to sign up for a rewards card and it allows you to get all of the stores sales! Pro tip: if you forget your loyalty card at home and they can’t look it up with your phone number, ask them to put into a store card so you still get the savings! If you don’t want your keys to be stacked with cards, they make plenty of apps to manage all your loyalty cards.
2. Store Apps
Price Chopper and Big Y both offer apps! I usually shop at Big Y and I love my Big Y app. With the Big Y app you can not only view the sale flyer for the week, you can also clip coupons to your card. They have so many coupon deals for products like yogurt, shampoo, snack foods, and more! If you’re going to be buying it anyway, definitely check if there’s a coupon for it! Once you click it to your card, you can forget about it! It stays on there until it expires. I always keep my app out with me while I shop to see what I might have a coupon for!
3. Ibotta!
Ibotta is so cool! It’s free to download and that’s where the fun begins. It’s essentially a rebate app. New offers are added all the time. Some of them are general like $0.50 off of any item. Others are more specific like $1.25 off of Light and Fit Yogurt. Depending on the store, you either submit photos of your reciept or it just links up to your card. For Big Y, where I primarily use Ibotta, it links with your card so a couple of days later I get my savings. After just three weeks of using Ibotta I have made $16! My mom has been using it for a while and has made over $200! Once you have made enough money, you can redeem your money for giftcards, or get it to your Venmo or PayPal account. It’s honestly amazing! Download it here, and use it within a week of download to get $10 added on top of your savings! It’s awesome to get a rebate back into your account for the products you love and buy often!
Shout out to my Mom, the coupon queen, for teaching me how to save money on groceries!