What is my challenge? Spend as close to $20 a week at Food Lion over the next 3 weeks while purchasing items we need or to add to the stockpile based on sales. I am also going to give myself $10 a week to spend at CVS to keep rolling ECB. So that is a total of $30 a week for the next 4 weeks to feed our family of 6.
I was doing so well,even convinced most of my family that we could do this. I bought a gallon of milk at Walmart on Monday, thinking that should last at least a week. My plan was to use my gift cards, rain checks and coupons to buy a couple more gallons at Harris Teeter and met the challenge. I even made it to Harris Teeter in front of the milk. As I doubled checked my coupons here is the problem, they have expired. So even using my rain checks I am going to have to pay $3.79 a gallon for milk.Grrrr, After discussion and based on the fact we needed at least 3 gallons at home, we decided to put back the milk at Harris Teeter and head to Costco.   I actually did very well only purchasing items that we were completely out of or on our last container of. So I ended up spending $95. on milk, juice, bread and cheese. So the third week of the challenge is a fail!  But my goal is to be back on track next week!  Finishing out with 2/3 weeks meeting goal. That is a major improvement from  my last attempt and still very helpful for my budget/

Because of the storms in our area, Haley’s football game was cancelled; so we decided to head to Winston-Salem to use some coupons and things that expire on 9/30. I was able to leave two stores without spending anything!

First stop was JCPenny’s, I have had a jcpenny’s card for years. In the past they would reward you for spending $500 a year on the card as well as extra “gifts” throughout the year. This changed at the beginning of this year. I had not use my card at all. But when we got pictures made, I decide to use it so that I could easily track that spending. Good thing, because after much debate, JCPenny’s started their reward program again. For every $100 you spend on your credit card in a month, you receive a $10 off $10 gift card. I had two of these. So I was able to purchase an orange owl shirt for LIly, a pair of short for Zach(put up for next year), a long sleeve shirt for Zach and a short sleeve shirt for Zach. Two transaction and I spent $0!!!!

After some other quick stops, we headed to Harris Teeter, after yet another mistake with the Express Lane shopping, I received 2 $5 gift cards. I also had several rain checks with coupons that were expiring 9/30. So I was able to pick up 4 2L Diet Cokes, 2 bottles of Dawn detergent, 2 bottles of Lysol toilet cleaner and 2 dozen eggs. After coupons and rain checks the total was $8.09 so I still have $1.92 on a gift card.  We did make a decision to head to Costco as well due to the fact milk was priced at $3.99 a gallon. But I left Harris Teeter with no out-of-pocket!