Top 7 Ways to Stock a Pantry on a Budget

1. Shop the sales! The best way to shop on a budget is by doing your homework and shopping the sales ad first. Making a shopping list is your best friend. So you can stay on track and stay organized. Now I wish I had a tip to help you remember your list but I do not. When you choose the sales items you want to stock up on. Don’t buy just 1 or 2 try to get 4 or 5 if your budget allows. Stocking up means buying more then you need right now and saving it for later.
2. Shop the discount stores! If you have a discount grocery store in your area don’t be scared to give it a try. We have one and some times I can find great deals to stock up on. For example one time they had large bags of asparagus on clearance for .99. I wasn’t turning that down, so I grabbed 5 or 6 bags brought them home and canned them. Sometimes you have be smart about the items you get from these stores. You should always check best by dates on them. Sometimes items are out of date or about out of date. which is fine if you plan on eating it now but not the best to go in the pantry.
3. Buy essentials whether you need them or not! Example of this is I buy one pack of toilet paper, laundry detergent and toothpaste every time I go to the store. I don’t need that pack just yet but I will. Your essentials may be different than mine. I chose those items because they are kinda expensive. I buy big containers of laundry detergent which is about $17 each time. I don’t have it in my budget to buy 5 of them at a time so we just get 1 every time we go into the store. I know you will laugh about the toilet paper and yes I have been doing this since BEFORE 2020. Our family had toilet paper during 2020. When the store had it we bought one pack the same as always, when they didn’t we were still fine because we had a pantry.
4. Use coupons and rebate apps! Now I know coupons scare people. Everyone either thinks about extreme couponing or that coupons are not for them. Listen we ant talking about extreme couponing! I’m just telling you to use coupons any coupons, when you are checking your sales ad always check if your store has store coupons. That will be on their website with their sales ad. Most all coupons have went digital now. So it is easy to add the store coupon to your store card and it comes off at check out. For rebate apps I love to use Ibotta click this link and it will take your there. They make it so easy to use, I have been using this app for a very long time and it has saved me over $500 to date. Use my referral code MQNFXIQ and get a $5 bonus when you submit your first receipt.
5. Subscription services! This may be a weird one but it works for our family. As I mentioned I recommend stocking up on essentials one at a time. Amazon has a subscription service that we use to have a few items sent to us every month. This will be different for your family but we have bulk salt and bulk tea bags sent every month. These are items are very important to us. Everyone needs salt! Also we are southern and drink a lot of tea. This way we can set it and kinda forget it. I do recommend you check this every so often and make sure the prices are still good and cancel when you no longer need it. My other favorite subscription service we use is chewy. If you have pets this is the best way to make sure you have food coming for them every month. Especially if you have pets with special diets like we do. During 2020 pet food was very hard to find. It still is sometimes. Again this is some thing you have to check often to make sure you are still getting a good deal. Also most subscription services give you a little discount just for subscribing. If you cant find certain items on sale this may be the best way to get them. It is better to get a small discount then no discount.
6. Rotate that pantry! So you are stocking on sales adds, using your rebate apps, a few coupons, checking out the discount stores and subscribed to some subscription services to fill in the gaps. All of that will be worthless if you do not rotate and use your pantry. When you bring in a new item it should always go to the back of the pantry. You should always use your oldest first. Another way to keep up with your pantry is to go through parts of it every so often. For us this is mostly in the winter months but we pick a part of the pantry. Canned food for example. We go through that part and see what we need to use then base our meal plan from that.
7. Don’t get overwhelmed! It’s okay! You wont build an amazing pantry over night. You don’t have to spent an extra $100 every grocery trip. If your budget has an extra $10 at first then just buy an extra $10 worth of food. If that’s only 10 cans of food a week then that’s fine. It is still something, Before our homestead started producing enough tomatoes to do us a year. We bought store canned tomatoes. You have to start somewhere. Everyday is a opportunity to grow, so take it day by day and week by week. Before you know it you will have an amazing pantry and a amazing homestead.

I know this is not the only way to save money on your pantry but these are ways that have helped our family. We hope our top 7 ways to stock a pantry on a budget help you as well. Until next week ya’ll keep busy and God bless.