This past week I sat down and penciled out a game plan for the rest of 2011. I need to get serious if I hope to reach my goal of spending only $1,200 ($100 a month) on food/toiletries for 2011.
Here are 2 major items I still need to work out:
#1 Chicken. I have no chicken in my freezer (but plenty of pork, hamburger & hot dogs). We love chicken. How am I going to get chicken?
#2 Baking supplies. Flour.Sugar.Butter. I was up late one night and thought it would be a good idea to order a (free/Swagbucks) 25 lb sack of whole wheat BREAD flour off Amazon at 1 in the morning. Great! Now I’ll be chained to my stove baking bread all winter. Butter: My stock up price for butter is usually $1.67 a lb. Deals like that don’t come around to often. Sugar: I like sugar. How am I going to get loads of sugar in time for the holidays?
So there you have it. Those are my hurdles. If you have any suggestions please leave them in the comment section below. I would really appreciate it. 🙂
Obviously, the name of the game this past week was stock up if the prices were low… Otherwise, Stay home and shop the pantry.
I was near a Walmart last week so I decided to head in and put a few coupons to good use. I used my $1/1 Simply Orange/Lemonade {NLA} coupons and scored FREE juice, picked up 2 FREE Renuzits (plus overage), 2 boxes of BenGay (remember those $5/1 coupons that were available a while back?), 2 containers of Reach Floss (plus overage) and a few bananas to soak up the overage after tax. I paid $.67 for everything you see above.
If you look closely at the receipt you will notice my subtotal is actually negative $.64 cents. Saweeet! I had to pay tax on the non-food items and ended up having to pay $.67 oop.
I ran into Fred Meyer to pick up 1 gallon of milk and noticed about 20 or so gallons marked down to $1.59 a gallon! The purchase by date was 9/16 so I have NO IDEA why they were marked down. I picked up 4 gallons and then proceeded to use my (3) $2 off coupons (from my rewards card rebate) on all the other items you see above.
$2 off school supplies, $2 off bread, $2 off health & beauty… So really I ended up only paying for the 4 gallons of milk plus a little extra in tax for my non-food purchases. $6.66 oop.
Shopping for free food at Albertsons this week was easy peasy. We have a major landscaping project slated for this fall so I decided to take advantage of the buy $100 in gift cards and receive a $10 Albertsons gift card promotion. It was a no brainer to me. I picked up $400 in Home Depot gift cards and received $40 in Albertsons gift cards.
This morning I headed on down to Albertsons and picked up a few double coupon deals. I did 4 transactions using (3) $.75/3 Hamburger Helper coupons and after doublers paid $.50 for 10 boxes + earned 35 (x4) box tops + a $2 (x4) off meat catalina coupon. I paid $.50 a bottle for the Garnier after doublers. I paid $1.00 for 10 boxes of Betty Crocker Scalloped potatoes after using 5 $.50/2 coupons + doublers and I also used my save $1.00 on Nabisco cookies WYB milk coupons and paid $6.18 for 2 gallons of milk. Bananas were $1.60.
I spent $16.12 out of my $40 in Albertsons gift cards, earned 140 box tops for my local elementary school and came home with $8 in meat catalinas. 🙂 Not too shabby if you ask me.
Total Spent This Week $7.33
Total Spent Year To Date $1,035.55
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