Wow! My first real post here at my new blog host! I have so many things that I want to write about, so I need to make sure to stay on track and not ramble :)
First, let me say that I am in no way affiliated with any of the companies that I am about to discuss. I'm simply a consumer giving my humble opinion after doing a bunch of research and comparison shopping.
Today is the last day of Honeyville's sale where they have offered a 15% off of your entire order coupon code----(It's SPLASH by the way) and I was sitting down to finally look at what they had to offer and to decide if I wanted to spend my monthly prepping budget there. I'm sure most people see "15% off your total order" and immediately start clicking away, filling their virtual shopping baskets with tons of fancy #10 cans with yummy food storage foods. However, it's so important to take a step back and really look at what you're getting, and do some comparison shopping to make sure that the sale is really a good bargain.
Let me start by saying that for many of my long term storage food staples, I use the LDS cannery as a mark for how much I should pay for those items. Although I do have to drive about an hour or so to get to the nearest cannery, the prices are so low that they usually justify the drive. They have great prices on rice, oats, beans, potato flakes, wheat, and powdered milk and they are always very helpful and welcoming. So, when I see that a company has one of those items on sale, I will first go to my LDS price list to see just how good of a deal it is.
However, if I'm not planning an LDS trip any time soon, then I head to the internet to start my comparison shopping. Here's one of the deals I had to work out today:
Kidney Beans- We need more. So, we head over to Honeyville and see that they have a 25 pound bag of Light Red Kidney Beans for $46.99 which would make it $39.94 with the 15% discount. This looks like a pretty good deal to me, however I need to take a step back and look at the fact that I need to factor in shipping, $4.49, and the fact that the beans would need to be repacked into either mylar bags, or mason jars (Which would just be silly considering there are 25lbs of beans!).
What usually helps me make my decision is to bring it down to the smallest measurement possible, which in this case is ounces. So at Honeyville, the beans are about 10 cents per ounce.
Next I headed over to Emergency Essentials, and saw that they had a Super Pail of Kidney Beans for $72.95. Now this doesn't look like a great deal at all! Seventy-two dollars? For Beans? But then I took a deep calming breath, put the cheap-monster back in the closet, and took a closer look.
Forty pounds of beans at $72.95 equals out to .12 cents an ounce. Still more expensive than Honeyville, however, the beans from Emergency Essentials come already packaged in a mylar bag, with an oxygen absorber, all inside of a 6 gallon bucket. This is way more bang for my buck! It beats the pants off of the Honeyville sale! So we ended up deciding to go with EE's beans.
I suppose the purpose of this rather long ramble is just to remind you to look at what you are getting when something is on "sale" and make sure to do your comparison shopping. There are usually better deals to be had when something is on "sale."
Also, remember that these companies will usually have a few great deals to bring you in, but that there other items are usually more expensive. So even though we went with Emergency Essentials for our beans, I had to take a step back and refrain from adding the food mill that I wanted into the order because when I looked over on Amazon.com I realized that EE's price was way more than Amazon would be. The moral of this story? Even though it may be more of a pain to go to different stores to get my prep needs, it's often more cost effective.
Finally, to be a frugal prepper keep the following things in mind:
1. Always comparison shop, and remember that sometimes it's easier to compare things by breaking them down to their smallest measurement.
2. Keep a list of the prices that you have found on things you know you need, that way you'll know when something is a good deal or not.
3. Be patient and wait for the right deal to come along. You don't want to jump the gun only to regret it when you find it somewhere else for a much cheaper price.
Happy Prepping!
-The Prepared Mom
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