My Price Book

I've read for years that one of the tricks to buying things on sale is to know if it's actually a good deal or not, and that one way to do that is to maintain a price book. A price book is just a list of the things you buy, the prices you paid, when and where. The first ones I read about involved using a notebook, one item per page, and keeping a sort of shopping diary. These days, it seems people are using spreadsheets. So that's what I've done, using a Google Docs spreadsheet.  Wil's Price Book

Using my receipts from last week's shopping, plus a few others I found laying around (mostly in the bottoms of shopping bags), I've got a list of prices for 140 different items. No real surprises at this point, except that eggs went up at Aldi and I didn't notice. But it's already been useful to be able to check prices to see if this weeks "sales" are really bargains or not.

At this point, I think I'll stick to using a Google Doc spreadsheet, which I can access on my iPod. There's also an iOS app called Best Price Book that might be worth a try, but I'm not sure it's worth it (both in terms of the price, and the time and effort it would take to fill in the data). I've installed the trial version, but I might wait a while before I make a decision about upgrading to the full version.