This is the last week in my grocery challenge to trim $200 from our grocery bill and I am happy to report – I DID IT!! The goal was to go from spending roughly $600 per month to just $400 – about a 33% reduction. The total I spent for this month on groceries (including household and baby items) was just….
In my budget, that is a savings of 37% or an actual $222.09! I will be putting this extra cash to paying down our debts and to hopefully get us to our goal even sooner. To me that total above is simply amazing. Amazing because I always thought I was a smart shopper before. Amazing because I didn’t think we had anywhere to scrape extra dollars like that from. Amazing because it was so much easier than I thought it could be!
I even saved money this week when I was feeling overwhelmed and tired and didn’t really get the greatest of deals. This way of shopping and the simple act of using coupons is really saving our family money and is sustainable. That is the important thing to me - that this will be something I can achieve consistently if I keep at it.
This week I spent $90.13 between 2 stores – under budget by almost $10. So without further ado… where did I shop and what did I get?
First we went to Target – now I admit we mostly went here to get a deal on Starbucks coffee and ended up with other things entirely. This is my problem going to “big box” type of stores where they have more than just grocery items – BUT - they do tend to have better prices on the household and baby items. I guess it’s a tradeoff and I just need to get more willpower not to scour the entire store! So, back to the shopping… we went to pick up Starbucks beans that were on sale AND had a $5 gift card offer. Most of the bags were gone, completely cleared out. The ones that were left were blends Mr. Wee doesn’t like so we didn’t get any coffee. Bummer! By the way, did you know there are smartphone apps that will pay you to snap a pic of empty shelves and upload them? Holy crap I would make so much money around here…. if only the apps were compatible with my phone! (iPhone users – check out gapNsnap if you are interested) So what did we buy here then? Baby Wee was out of Hylands Teething Tablets – best invention ever – so we picked those up using a Cartwheel offer. We also used a Cartwheel and Target coupon to purchase Plum Organic baby food packets. Finally, they had a sale on a giant jar of Jif for $5 – normally the same jar runs $6.99 at the grocery store. Total spent: $24.99, total saved: $6.37.
The bulk of our shopping was done at Kroger. I will admit I had been in a sort of love affair with Kroger the past few weeks after getting some great deals. This week, I even decided to skip looking at my local Ingles ad because I was certain the better deals would be here – mistake. Ok, I did still get some good deals here this week but I’ve become slightly disenchanted. I got caught up in the 10/$10 promotion but found many of the items cleared out from the shelves… other shoppers informed me they had been empty since the day the ad came out. Maybe they restocked during the promo, maybe they didn’t. Either way, I was disappointed. I was able to get greek yogurt, frozen veggies, organic mac n cheese, pasta and condensed soups (yes, I know making them is healthier but time is sometimes a premium!) for $1 or less when combined with coupons. I also stocked up on organic chicken broth for soups for fall! Overall I spent $65.14 here and saved $33.94 – a 36% savings. After the last few weeks of saving 40% or more, this felt like a fail. But I still saved money – that is the most important thing to remember!
Next week I plan to recap some of the biggest things I’ve learned over the last 4 weeks but if you want to start saving now, I really want to encourage you to check out the banner link to my affiliate below:
I know I’ve mentioned Grocery University in previous weeks of this challenge, but I cannot stress enough how great this program has been for our family! I bought the program figuring I would at least recoup the cost of the program with a tip or two, so what was the harm? The program costs $9.97 and over the last 4 weeks I’ve saved $222.09. Seriously, how can you not love that? Some of the tips are common sense or things you might know if you’ve been on a tight budget, but I think there are at least one or two tricks your family might benefit from in there too. I encourage you to check it out!
What does your grocery budget look like? Could you stand to trim it?
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