Saving money on groceries

Me and my wife try to take every (reasonable) method we have to minimize our grocery bill. We make a list, we try to stick to it, we go shopping at WinCo foods (a discount grocery chain kind of like a cross between Costco and WalMart, except it's employee owned and local, and no membership is required), and we buy generic and pay close attention to price per unit.

One thing that we never realized was costing us money was one simple thing: We had no idea how much we actually had! We would sometimes grab diced tomatos, or canned beans, just because we thought we might need more.

Well, we just did an inventory of our pantry (I was looking for something to munch on, and I was so struck by how much actual food we had, we just fell into it.) We have noodles galore, over 12 cans of diced tomatos, side dishes, starches, rice, beans, canned and frozen vegetables, snack bars, sandwich stuff, you name it.

After looking at everything, we determined that we probably have enough food for a couple of weeks. It was like a shopping trip for free, discovering things up at the top of the cupboards that we forgot we had. Now, our shopping trip will only consist of fruits and veggies, and a couple of missing items for specific recipes.

The same concept is probably true all over the house. We haven't bought DVDs in months, because of how many movies and such we already have (I'm looking at just selling them soon, we don't watch them enough to justify the storage space). We have books we've barely read, toys and gadgets that sit in boxes, clothes that we haven't worn in a long time.

If we continue to tackle things like we just did the cupboards, we could not only clear out a lot of clutter, we could save money by not buying things we didn't know we already had.