Saturday Shopping

I subscribe to this blog called Money Saving Mom that sends out "deals" at different stores and encourages thrifty shopping habits. The person who writes the blog is a Christian home school mom so I can identify with her! She's moral with her thriftiness which is great too! With the amount of stuff that's on her blog though, she definitely puts in quite a few hours of work a day.

Anyway, they suggest that you post about your Saturday Shopping Deals. I had the opportunity to go grocery shopping all by myself yesterday. A great bonus is that some friends lent me their automatic car so I didn't have to do the boot transfer at every store. When I shop all by myself, I am more free to peruse for bargains and look through coupons than if the boys are with me!

The biggest shopping requirement yesterday was to get the big guy some black pants and shoes for his first concert as part of Rolla Young Singers. Amazingly the pants and the shoes that I bought did fit! He even liked the cheaper pants of the two pair that I brought home. I picked up some traditional black dress pants as well as some black cargo pants. Both of them fit, but he thought the dress pants were more appropriate. (Yes, he used that word.) I couldn't disagree though I think they'll pretty much get worn one more time and that will be it!

Back to shopping...I went to Aldi, Kroger and Country Mart to buy groceries. I spent $115 which is more than I like to spend in a week on groceries. Even though I spent that much, I did get some good deals and we won't eat all of this food in a week. I didn't plan out meals before I went shopping which is a pretty big no-no for me so now I'm going to have to plan our meals around what I have on hand. We definitely have lots of vegetables to eat, the protein may be a little more lacking.

Kroger has a buy 8, get $4 off promotion going on. I had coupons for quite a few things so that was my primary reason for shopping, we also were out of fresh fruit and almost out of fresh vegetables so I wanted to pick those things too. Unfortunately they were out of some of the items on their promotion, so I will probably go back and spend a little more of our money food budget.

My Kroger receipt says that I saved $52.01 and I spent $46.22. I don't think that's too bad. Even though I was after those things that were on sale, I did have a few things on my list that we were out of like peanut butter that I picked up.

My best buy? Oscar Meyer Bacon - 2 1lb packages
Sale price $2.77/package
2 $1.50 coupons
Paid $1.27 per package.
Received a $1 off next purchase as well which brought each package of bacon under a dollar. (Breakfast for dinner one night this week.)

I had an extra Lunchable Coupon left from a few weeks ago. Not normally something that I would buy, but I ended up paying $.24 for one. Not a bad price for a treat my kids get very excited about! (Part of a lunch for field trip tomorrow.)

We are trying some Smart Balance Sour Cream for the first time. We use their "buttery spread" so I thought we would try the sour cream. I paid $.49 per 16oz tub for that as a final price. (Bean Burritos are yummy with sour cream.)

At Kroger I got two $4 off because I bought 16 items. Most of the items I had additional coupons for except for the Kraft cheese. The cheese is a good price, even cheaper than Aldi when you bought 8 so I definitely got some of that. I will probably go back again and get some more just because it's that good of a deal.

My other shopping wasn't as exciting. Aldi was just "normal" stuff for us. Juice, yogurt, fruit, fresh vegetables. I did pick up some egg rolls there - they had vegetarian ones which I was excited to see. (I'm guessing that we'll have stir-fry some time this week!)

Country Mart was a quick trip. They had some frozen vegetables on sale and I had coupons for those (Steamfresh .99 - .35 cent coupon doubled, .29 per package). They also had fresh Brussels Sprouts on sale too for $1.49/pound. My family loves those and that was a great price. We ate half of the three pounds that I bought last night with pizza! Unfortunately the Dole coupons were gone at the salad so I had to pay $1 per bag of salad!

Enough of my shopping adventure. Reading this blog and reading about getting deals is fun. I have realized that it takes time to print coupons and figure it all out. I have spent quite a bit of time on this in the last few weeks. The time that I'm spending will constantly need to be evaluated. I am buying food or other things that I wouldn't normally buy? Are we consuming what I am buying? Should I spend that time on something different? If this is "my time" is this how I want to be spending it?

I also picked up some pasta and pasta sauce pretty cheap (Classico - $1.99, $1.00 off two jars - $.50 off because they were part of the promotion - .99/jar). So pasta will be another meal this week! I think I have four dinners planned out while I wrote this blog! Happy Shopping!