🤑 Do YOU budget/save? Any TIPS to share?

[Anonymous]

(3 comments) ➡️To reply, click on reply button at bottom of this post. Enter your text. Click reply button again. ⬅️

Read comments and/or comment.

The EXPERTS recommend WE try to stick to a BUDGET and SAVE on a regular basis. 😉

[EricC28201 · Accepted solution]

I wasn't going to post my comments on Brand Loyalty because they make me sound like a grumpy, stingey old codger, but Serendipity stepped in. 

It Skips over the mundane everyday stuff where appreciable savings are available, but the general idea makes it a good read:

AARP Article on The Hazards of Brand Loyalty 

[EricC28201]

Just one more thing that even the Contributor didn't mention in that other post...Always check the Unit Price...reducing package size instead of (or along with) raising price has been around for a while.  Similar products may be marketed in different size packages.  What looks like a deal in the store might be a smaller package with less product, but you don't notice until you get it home.

[fffred · Accepted solution]

---

.  Similar products may be marketed in different size packages.  What looks like a deal in the store might be a smaller package with less product, but you don't notice until you get it home.

---

This is a funny thing. I often suspect that the packaging costs more than the actual product. Many years ago in university a buddy was majoring in agriculture, his family owned a farm (corn and hogs) in Iowa. His coursework on farm economics included the information that, at that time at least, the cost of the corn flake cereal was less than the packaging it came in!

Now that I think about it there are a lot of questions about this. But the point remains. And I suppose it's substantiated by how products bought in bulk can be incredibly cheap... food in bins at the grocery store; hardware products bought in bulk instead of small packages. Etc.

Now as a tangential thought I'm reminded of a recent "thing" making the rounds on the internet that a "recession is here" because Walmart started selling sugar cookies in packs of two. I suppose to minimize the upfront cost to the consumer. (for example, see https://www.dailydot.com/irl/walmart-sugar-cookies-recession/). This would be an extreme case of increasing prices by reducing the size of the package. Although in this case it's more likely that this size was sold for convenience, no way would this sell for the same price (or near) as older packaging with more cookies in it.

Another tangent, the two-cookie package does remind me of how in my wife's birth country of the Philippines that, even today, people can go to the local sari-sari store down the street and buy their cigarettes 2 at a time:  the store owner buys whole packages of their wares from the regular stores (even the warehouse stores to buy in bulk) then sells affordable quantities to their customers...who live on subsistence wages and don't have enough cash at one time to buy a full pack of cigarettes. I sometimes fear that the US is heading in this direction.

[EricC28201 · Accepted solution]

I wasn't going to post my comments on Brand Loyalty because they make me sound like a grumpy, stingey old codger, but Serendipity stepped in. 

It Skips over the mundane everyday stuff where appreciable savings are available, but the general idea makes it a good read:

AARP Article on The Hazards of Brand Loyalty