See the details of my $200 a month grocery shopping trips and learn the things that I do to save and live well on a low budget with my family of five!
Some of you have wondered where I get my printable coupons. Here are the main coupon sites that I use: Coupons.com, Smart Source, Red Plum and Ibotta. Manufacturer websites and Facebook pages are another great source.
If you are new here and unfamiliar with my weekly What I Spent & Saved posts, it probably is helpful to understand a bit about how I shop. I do something called stockpile shopping. This simply means that when I see an item at rock bottom prices that I regularly use or know that I can use, I’ll buy several of it. This might seem kind of crazy, but it honestly saves me hundreds of dollars a year! Simply put, by buying 6 bags of frozen veggies when I can get them for $0.50/bag with a coupon and sale instead of paying the full price of $1.50, I save $6.00. This savings adds up pretty quickly! Want to know more about this kind of shopping?
I also buy meats and veggies in bulk. The meat I either can or freeze and then obviously have it on hand whenever I need it. I buy large quantities of fruits and veggies when they are in season and I can get them at really great prices. By canning or freezing them, I save a lot and we are able to enjoy great produce for less cost all year long. I do still buy some fresh fruits and veggies too. In fact, every 7 to 10 days I go to our local farmer’s market and get several heads of lettuce so that we can enjoy salads at least 4 times a week.
I hope that helps you make sense of some of this. I realize at first glance it can really look like we eat rather strangely! Of course, if you have any questions feel free to ask them in the comments! I’ll be more than happy to try to answer them.
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Total Spent: – $4.73 (negative due to credit as recorded below)
Total Saved with Coupons: $14.00
Total Saved with Sales: $16.54
Total Saved: $30.54
Giant: $1.86
Saved with Coupons: $14.00
Saved with Sales: $16.54
Please excuse the poor quality and missing images. I somehow deleted a bunch of my pictures and the few I was able to retrieve were of poor quality. 🙁
We are still away at the Bible school where my husband is teaching, but we did go home for the weekend. However, I didn’t have time to do any shopping other than go to Giant. And unfortunately, Giant was out of stock on a couple of the items that I wanted to buy, so I ended up having to get rain checks to buy them later. Oh and the reason for the unusual pictures that you see above? I forgot my camera and didn’t have any way of taking a picture of the things that I purchased. So I had to get creative and do it another way! 🙂
I typically make my own whole wheat bread, but since I was able to get this Nature’s Harvest bread for better than free, I decided to get it. It isn’t made with high fructose corn syrup or artificial flavors so it’s better than many bought breads. And sometimes when I’m busy and don’t have much extra time to get bread made, it’s really nice to have bought bread like this to fall back on. While I’m all about making my own things and eating healthy, I’m also an advocate of being flexible and changing things up if it makes sense!
The bread was actually part of Giants gas reward deals where when you bought 7 participating items, you got $10.00 in gas savings. I wanted to buy 4 bread and 3 of another participating item that they were out of stock on. So I got a rain check for the other items and they will add the gas points to my account when I purchase those things. I think I made about $1.90 on the bread after coupons/sales/gas savings.
We love Eight O’Clock coffee and I always try to stock up on it when Giant has it on sale for buy one, get one free. I bought 4 because I had hoped to use the $1.25/3 Ibotta Eight O’clock offer. Unfortunately, either my phone or the Ibotta app is acting up because I can’t get it to work. So I’ll probably end up returning 2 of the bags since I didn’t really need them and would prefer waiting until I can get them for less using more coupons. If I do that, I’ll be paying $1.65 each for the 2 bags that I’ll keep.
BOUGHT:
- 4 Nature’s Harvest Whole Wheat bread $1.50 each
– used two $1/2 Arnold bread coupons from Sunday newspaper coupon inserts
– got back $0.25 via Ibotta for purchasing bread (could be used on any brand) - 4 Eight O’Clock $2.65 each (on sale Buy One, Get One Free)
– used two $1.00 Eight o’clock printable coupons
OTHER COUPONS USED:
- $10.00 Catalina coupon received for purchasing $30 worth of Huggies diapers last week
Credits: $6.59
I cashed out my Saving Star account since I had met the $5 minimum. I love Saving Star! It’s such a super easy way to save. Sometimes the savings is for things I’d purchase anyway and sometimes I buy things because they end up being a great deal due to the extra savings.
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Shirley
Thank you for this newsletter. It’s an eye opener!!
Lydia Beiler
So glad that it was helpful to you, Shirley!