Super Saving Grocery Trip

A lot of thrifty moms are out there and a lot of them share their thrifty ways in their blogs and even make money doing it. I have been partaking of their knowledge and trying to cut down our grocery budget. I have been following MoneySavingMom.com for about 3 weeks taking her tips and printing coupons from her site. I snatched about 3 coupon inserts from my Mother-in-law's Sunday paper. I had a small receipt file folder that I used to use for filing scrapbooking embellishments and made dividers for my coupons.

Now some people cut every single coupon and spend 3-4 hours shopping at several different stores. I don't need closets full of mouthwash and toothpaste (maybe an extra tube or two of toothpaste) so I don't cut every coupon. I don't have an extra freezer, so we are limited by what we can freeze and we have plenty of closet and storage space, but not a lot of shelves in them. So we are starting small and only buying what we will use within the next 6 months or so. Someday we will have our year supply of food and necessities.

Our first shopping trip was a success and not too terribly stressful (shopping with 3 kids is always stressful). We bought: sugar, bananas, 2 bags croutons, Sandies cookies, 18 carton of eggs, 10 packets of Kool-Aid, 2 boxes Granola bars, Band-Aids, travel size hand lotion, 6 boxes Hamburger Helper, a Pineapple, bag of salad, 3 packages of tortillas, 8lbs. of cheese, 2 bags hot dog buns, 2 bags hamburger buns, 2 gallons of milk, an onion, 4 apples, 4 ears of corn, 5 nectarines, 6 2liters of Pepsi, Gallon Tampico juice, 2 boxes gogurt, 2 6packs of Trix Yogurt, and 1 pack of drinkable yogurt.

We spent $63 and saved $54. That's a 46.5% savings! Walmart will ad match competitors prices. So I borrowed ads from my dear Mother-in-law and made my shopping list of the best deals from 3 different ads. Then I went through my coupons and the trick is to use coupons on the already on sale items. In coupons alone I saved $17.00 and the rest was ad matching. At Macey's 2lb.Cheese was on Sale for $3.99. The Walmart price was $6.38 a $2.39 savings. Plus I had coupons for $1.00 off any cheese. I had 4 coupons, so I bought 4 2lb. bags of cheese. I spent $11.96 on 8 lbs. of cheese and saved $13.56. Needless to say, I won't need to buy cheese for awhile. I bought one block of cheese for sandwiches and then 3 bags of shredded. It freezes well. I had a $1.00 off coupon on any vaseline lotion. I bought the travel size for .97 and so I actually was paid .03 to buy it. It is a manufacture's coupon, so Walmart gets paid the $1.00 and I get big savings. I paid full price for bananas and eggs. Walmart's prices were better than any other ad and it is hard to find coupons for those things. So now that I did my shopping, I make the week's menu with what we have. Including planning breakfast, lunches and snacks. I didn't have to buy any meat this week, because we already have it in the freezer. I spent about 1 hour total with clipping coupons and looking through the ads. And shopping took us an hour and 15 minutes. Which shopping usually takes us 45 minutes at least anyway. And now I need to get in bed!! Happy Saving!!!