Debt Free 2015: Is Costco Worth it?

As a single woman living in a very expensive part of the country, I am constantly looking to save money. One of the ways espoused on many blogs is joining Costco or Sam's club. But the people who do this are typically families with houses and extra fridges it seems like. For this reason  I held out on joining Costco for a very long time. I didn't think I would be able to spend enough/have the storage for purchases. Yet still I was drawn to joining one of these price clubs.

Every year I would go back and forth trying to decide if I should join. I would read every blog post and article about the costs of a membership and eventually decide I didn't need it and I probably wouldn't get my money's worth of it. However, in November 2014, I finally gave in and bought a membership. Oh how I wish I would have done it sooner.

I understand that my circumstances are very different from many people and therefore it is important to sit down and have a game plan before joining Costco. When I was deciding to join I had three things that were eventually the deciding factors:

• Owning Pets
• Deciding to prepare freezer meals
• Being in charge of catering company lunches

While I am no longer with my company, and therefore do not have to pick up cases of soda and bags of chips each month, the other two reason more than make up for the cost of my membership, particularly Pet Food!

To help you show you my savings I compared the price of the 10 items I recently bought on a trip from Costco with prices from the pet store and another "saver" store near me (Smart and Final). I estimated how much of each product I would use in a year and compared it to a years worth of similar products. If you want to see my complete breakdown you can check it our here

As you can see the savings are fairly substantial. And this doesn't even include other things I've bought there, such as: meat, produce, wine, housewares etc.

One last note: I am incredibly picky about what I feed my pets. Before switching them to Kirkland brand food I spent a good amount of time researching the ingredients. It is comparable to many premium pet foods and much better than grocery store pet food. Both my animals do incredibly well on it.