Introducing the PricesWiki

In our efforts to budget properly, we’ve started to see how much eating out costs when friends and relatives visit, and started to cook a lot more at home when it’s just us. So I’ve been doing a lot of shopping at the grocery store, and trying to use Couponing as much as possible. One major hurdle I’ve come across is deciding at what price something is worth stocking up for.

So thanks to a 1-Click Install by Dreamhost and many hours last night futzing with it, I have created a PricesWiki for groceries. If you aren’t familiar with Wikipedia, it’s an encyclopedia written collaboratively by everyone on the internet. It’s like a big shared chalkboard that anyone can write on and/or erase. Thus, PricesWiki is supposed to be a place where everyone can help decide what a good price for something is. For example, at http://prices.mymoneyblog.com/Butter you can see what a good price for butter might be. Disagree? Change it or add your own opinion. No need to log in, just click on ‘edit’ and go for it. I encourage everyone to check it out and contribute something!

The problem with this is that without a critical mass of contributors, this will flop. I’m going to also introduce it at some grocery coupon forums I visit and see if people will actually use it. If you have some favorite forums for this too please leave them in the comments, and I will visit them too. My ultimate goal is for someone to be able to input their shopping list, and for the site to be able to spit out a good price for each item.

Also, I realize there will be local variations in price. If you live in Hawaii or somewhere where certain things are more expensive, you could add a special note saying that.

(Well, that was a flop… I killed the subdomain)