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!
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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, Ibotta and Checkout 51. 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? Check out my post on How to Start Building a Grocery Stockpile.
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 purchase 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 look like we eat rather strangely but I think we really eat quite well! 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: $27.67
Total Saved with Coupons: $40.05
Total Saved with Sales: $21.09
Total Saved: $61.14 + $7.50 in gas reward savings
Giant: $10.71 + $1.37 in grocery cash
Saved with Coupons: $22.05
Saved with Sales: $12.59
I knew I had done well at Giant this week, but when I got home and figured out that I paid just $3.33 for everything that you see (after coupons/sales/gas savings), I was pretty happy!
The Dole frozen fruit came out to just $0.20/bag, which is an amazing price and is obviously way cheaper than I could even buy fruit in season and freeze it myself! We love using frozen fruit for Easy Frozen Fruit Smoothies and also enjoy it as part of our lunch sometimes too, especially the blueberries.
The Hanover peas were $0.10 each after coupons and sales, which is a good price for sure! I was actually almost out of peas, so I was really happy to be able to get more without needing to pay much.
I don’t buy much juice, but since I could combine coupons and sales and get it for just $0.29 each, I decided it was a great time to enjoy some!
The bananas were $0.18 after an Ibotta offer. One of the things that I really love about Ibotta is that they regularly have offers for savings on fruits and veggies. They also often have “any brand” offers where you can save $0.25 on any brand of all sorts of items- things like bread, milk, cheese, cereal etc. It’s so nice because often the “any brand” offers are for things that I already was planning to purchase and I get to enjoy additional savings. I also love that I can combine Ibotta offers with printable coupons for maximum savings.
(If you haven’t signed up for Ibotta yet, sign up here and get a $10 account credit when you redeem your first offer! You can’t beat that!!)
And since I try to make these posts educational for you, I thought I should point out two things that I did this week that helped me save big. They were to utilize rain checks and also to combine coupons/sales/savings offer for maximum savings. Let me explain.
Before I used coupons a lot, I had no idea how powerful rain checks were in helping you save! Basically, if your grocery store is out of stock on a sale item, you can ask for a raincheck and then you can use the rain check to buy the product later for the sale price. I do this regularly, especially for gas reward deals. The great thing about it is that not only can you get the sale price later and obviously save, you can also watch for coupons to match with the item to save even more than you may have initially! Sometimes I’m actually thankful that I had to get a rain check because later a coupon will show up for the item and I’ll be able to get a better deal than I expected. That happened with the Dole fruit this week. When I happened to spot $1.00 Dole frozen fruit coupons I knew that it was the perfect time to use my raincheck and get huge savings!
This leads me to my second tip of combining coupons and savings offers with sales. You’ll notice that with the Dole fruit offer I combined multiple coupons to save a lot of money. I used printable paper coupons, a load-to-card ecoupon (can be found when you log into your Giant.com account), a coupon from the coupon kiosk inside the front door at my store as well as a Saving Star offer! Any time that you can, combine coupons to save as much as possible. To be clear, you can only use one manufacturer paper coupon per item, but you can always add ecoupons, store coupons and app savings from Ibotta and Checkout 51for additional savings on an item. It’s one of the ways that I really can save big a lot of times!
BOUGHT:
- 2 Simply Juice $2.59 each (on sale through 4/7/16)
– used $0.75/2 Simply Juice Giant load-to-card ecoupon
– used two $0.55 Simply Juice printable coupons (doubled to $1.00 each) - Simply Juice $0 (on sale for buy 2, get 1 free)
– used $0.55 Simply Juice Giant load-to-card ecoupon
– used $0.55 Simply Juice printable coupons (doubled to $1.00 each) - Bananas $0.43
– got back $0.25 via Ibotta - 5 Dole frozen blueberries $1.56 each (bought with rain check)
– rain check was written for Buy $20 worth, save $10 instantly- the price above reflects that
– used four $1.00 Dole frozen fruit printable coupons
– used $1.00 Dole Giant load-to-card ecoupon
– used $0.50 off any frozen food purchase Giant coupon (prints at kiosk in-store)
– got back $4.00 via Saving Starfor purchasing $12.00 of Dole frozen food - 2 Dole frozen strawberries $2.99 each (bought with rain check)
- 8 Hanover petite peas $1.66 each (bought with rain check)
– used four $1/2 Hanover veggies printable coupon
– used $1.00 Hanover Giant load-to-card ecoupon
OTHER COUPONS USED:
- $3.00 Catalina coupon earned on previous Giant purchase (can be used on any purchase)
GOT BACK:
- $7.50 in gas reward savings for purchasing the Hanover peas
CVS: $16.96
Saved with Coupons: $18.00
Saved with Sales: $8.50
I know cloth diapers are a bit of a money saver, at least if you use them with multiple kids, but they are just one thing I’m not quite willing to do at this point. So I love saving money by purchasing diapers at rock bottom prices and building a diaper stockpile. I save so much this way that I don’t really feel bad about not using cloth diapers.
This week I was able to get Huggies diapers for just $3.99/pack. My buy price is $5.00 or less, so I was very happy with this deal! Again, I combined printable coupons with app savings from Checkout 51 for maximum savings.
I also picked up some cashews for $2.99. I find that when I’m pregnant I need to snack more often and so I’m trying really hard to keep healthy snacks on hand. Nuts are one of my favorites and I also like my Easy 3 Ingredient Healthy Fudge.
BOUGHT:
- 3 Huggies diapers $9.99 each
– used $4/2 Huggies printable coupon
– used $2.00 Huggies printable coupon
– got back $1.00 via Checkout 51 for the Huggies Little Snugglers
– got back $1.00 via Checkout 51 for the Huggies Snug & Dry - Gold Emblem (CVS brand) cashew halves & pieces $4.99
– used $2.00 CVS Gold Emblem nuts printable coupon
OTHER COUPON USED:
- $10.00 in Extra Bucks earned by purchasing items previously at CVS
GOT BACK:
- $10.00 Extra Bucks for purchasing the Huggies (can be used on the future purchase of any item at CVS)
Esther A. Varughese
Hi. First and foremost, thanks so much for posting all of your amazing tips. I’m currently a stay at home mom. And we have only one income coming in. My inlaws are tornado victims and have lost everything and trying to rebuild right now. They are currently living with me. Little history about myself, my parents are from India. I cook Indian food which consists of rice, some type of curry (meat or seafood).vegetable and some type of gravy ( most of the time its yogurt based).The curry can last for 2-3 days at times. But there are times I like to make other stuff. I grow my own peppers and tomatoes. And have family members who have various gardens full of okra, bitter gaurd and more. I live in Dallas, TX and would like to know how to use coupons to save money. I read that you can use 1 manufacture coupon for each item. But can we add on other coupons as well? We have Walmart, Albertsons, Tom Thumb, and Kroger. I would love to learn how you save money.
ThriftyFrugalMom
You are so very welcome, Esther! Helping people save money brings me lots of joy. 🙂
So sorry to hear about your in-laws. Wow, losing everything would be incredibly difficult! And curry? Yum! Wish you could come cook a dinner for me.
Coupons are an awesome way to stretch your money, especially if you can combine them with a sale. And yes, you are right that you can use 1 manufacturer coupon per item. Or if it says $1 off 2 items, then obviously one coupon per 2 items. The great thing is that you can use coupon apps along with manufacturer coupons to save even more! So for instance, say you buy a box of cereal and have a coupon for $1.00 off. If there is also an offer on one of the coupon apps for that same cereal, you can use that as well to save an additional amount. Ibotta is my favorite coupon app (I talk about it in depth here), but Checkout 51 and Saving Star are also really good too.
I did a bit of searching and found a couple of coupon blogs that do coupon match-ups for the stores you mentioned. Here they are: The Krazy Coupon Lady (click on the stores tab) and Surviving the Stores. Hopefully that will help you out! And if you have more questions, feel free to ask!