Category Archives: Shopping

Weeks of Busyness- Weekend catch

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December is always a busy month but this year, I think it has decided to speed up!  Each of the three weeks prior to Christmas seems  to be stuffed full of activities, practices and parties. The very sad part about this is that I know that next week including the weekend is going to be some of the busiest time of the year.

Just for the sake of truth here is our schedule for the first two weeks of December :
Monday- Chorus til 4pm, Cheerleading from 5:45 til 7 for Kendall and til 8 for Lily. Because of the huge time difference, I am actually picking up Kendall and bringing her home both weeks.
Tuesday- Chorus til 4pm and piano for both girls-  We consider this our easiest night!
Wednesday- Church activities
Thursday- Cheerleading from 5:45 to 7:30 for both.

Looks like fun doesn’t it?  Add to this craziness that we arrived home last Sunday night around 8pm from our trip.  Matt has spent most of his time unpacking that is between picking up and taking children to these activities.  On Thursday of this week, we had to restock our food supply and we ended up picking up a third refrigerator, which add another whole day of non-stop activity.

So today (Saturday aka Lily’s birthday), I decided that I would need to get up the rest of our Christmas decoration in order to be able to even enjoy them. One small problem,  I have spent several hours looking both online and in person for an artificial Christmas tree with no real luck in finding exactly what I wanted.  Until I was talking with my mother and discovered she has a very large artificial tree in her attic. Last night after work, we went and claimed this tree. Matt used an air compressor to clean out most of the dust and we set up our rainbow to clean the air around it over night. I will admit that I can understand why it is too much tree for her. She said she spent over 3 hours putting it together the year she used it. Between Matt and myself, I would estimate we have spent around an hour working on it. But it is perfect, I will hopefully get some pictures to post in the next day or so.

In addition to decorating, we have planned a small for us, birthday dinner for Lily for today. Tomorrow I am teaching the 2-3 years old during service, the kids will be performing one song during the regular service and they have play practice from 3:30 til 5:30. Next week is the same schedule as last with the addition of a practice Saturday morning of the children’s musical at church.  The kids will be performing the musical on Saturday and Sunday night. Finally on Monday night, Lily has her chorus performance.

I am going to take an extra day off work prior to Christmas but the state of running between activities should remain at least for a couple of weeks. If I go MIA for the next couple of weeks, you now know where I will be heading!

 

Trouble with Shopping or How I Spent our Entire Grocery Budget in a Day!

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If you will recall, I had planned to not shop much in the month of November. One of the reason was to continue reducing down our stockpile in addition to not wanting to leave a lot of food in our refrigerator while we were away. So it was starting to look a little bare around here and we had already plan to do a major shopping trip the first of December.

I was super excited to find out that Starbuck’s K-cup were going to be on an awesome sale at Harris Teeter this week, Matt was even more excited than I was!  The deal was part of “stock up” where you must buy 5 or more of an item to get the best price. 5 10 cup packs of Starbuck K cup for $25 is a good deal to begin with but I also had enough coupons for 10 boxes.. After looking over the ad, I planned to also purchase the 24 packs of water along with some can vegetables and cheese as well.  I love Harris Teeter an even after my problems today, they still are my favorite store. The problems started at check out, I am very careful to watch all my coupons but the computer can sometimes not always be kind. The first problem that was an easy fix with a manager key is that it said I had too many coupons. The store policy is that they will double up to 20 coupons a day. I actually only had 13 coupons to double but I had around 10 coupons that were valued at $1.50 or more and would not double. I guess the computer does not recognize the difference.  Next as my receipt was printing, I realized that my waters had not rang up at the EVIC price, this can only be corrected at the service desk. I was disappointed but it happens so I stopped by the desk.   Matt did make the comment that it seems that we had spent a lot for a trip and our saving was not adding up. I started looking over the receipt and realized that only 5 of my packs of K cups had rang up at the correct price. Luckily we were less than 5 minutes from the store so we turned around and headed back to the service desk. They were already aware of the problem but it still took around 15 minutes to get my $12 refund back to me. I am so glad that I was using cash this day because it makes all the changes and refunds much easier!

Next we stopped at JC Penny’s to return a pair of boots, I order over Thanksgiving. I have wide feet and fat calves  so finding boots to fit is near impossible. I tried on around 20 pair in the store now of which fit the way I wanted. I did find 2 pair of boots that I really liked that were available with wide calves, so I purchased both to be shipped to my house. UPDATE: One pair arrived and does not fit!  I guess I will stick to the short ugly ones I have!

After grabbing some lunch, we headed to Costco where we need to purchase lots of fruits and vegetables in  addition to milk, eggs, bacon, cream cheese, etc.  You get the idea and after spending over $400 you would think this would be the end to my grocery shopping. Not so, I also had to go to Aldi to pick up turkey and backing supplies.  Even Aldi did not get my order right today. I was charged for 3 rugs instead of 2 but caught the mistake before leaving the store so I was able to get a cash refund as well.

We currently have $15 left in our grocery budget for the month, which will certainly be used to purchase last-minute party supplies for school and home.  As you can tell, today was not the easiest shopping day and I am so glad that I have no plans to shop for groceries again until after Christmas!  Matt mostly likely will be making the trip to pick up items as they are needed!

 

 

Five Things Friday- Shopping

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One of the things that I consider a real special treat/requirement when visiting Michigan is a trip to “Bronner’s”. This year, I was able to add several new pieces including a house to my snow village.  I can’t wait to get home to add these pieces to the ones that I already have in place.

Matt choice one store to visit on Black Friday- it was a local sporting store called “Dunhams”. He purchased 3 Michigan State t-shirts and a pair of work boots for $48!

I am planning on adding a second tree  to the house this year and decided it will be a “Disney”  themed tree. I have slowly been collecting Disney ornaments over the years and purchased several new items including a tree topper today at the Disney Store  outlet. If time permits, I am also going to check on line for any other awesome deals.

Zach is growing again, this time all his shirts are too short.  I have purchased a couple of new shirts for him and a sweater to wear at Christmas, but am planning to switch out all his 4T shirt for the new 5T ones that I have been collecting over the past couple of months.

I have spent the most time ever shopping for clothes for myself this trip. I am excited to be able to purchase things several sizes smaller but also a little afraid that if I am not careful I will quickly outgrow these items. I guess this is motivation for me to keep working out on a regular basis.

Another Chicken Day

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Yesterday, we picked up more chicken from Zaycon foods. After some debate, we decided to purchase another 120#. Last year we purchased the same amount but spent a lot of time and energy just figuring out what to do with it. Overall, the chicken lasted our family around 10 months. This year, our order was delay by one month due to “higher” prices so in reality we have been out of chicken for around 3 months now. iwas able to find some on sale but it still was more expensive and of a lesser quality than what we purchased from Zaycon.   Luckily I was able to get an awesome deal because I had ordered early, spending an average of $1.77 a pound of boneless skinless chicken breast.

Here are most of the details of our first purchase last October. I spent the better part of a week, planning and organizing for this. I can honestly say that I was more than disappointed with the results, most of the recipes were just ok and I did not leave myself with any raw chicken to make things that we did enjoy as a family. So this was a major part of the decision to scale back and simplify this year.  I decided to only make recipes that I knew we enjoyed. I also scaled back on the portions to eliminate a lot of the leftovers and to give a better variety.

I started planning on paper on Thursday and both Matt and I did a shopping trip to different grocery stores on Friday am. In total we spent $63.91 on ingredients that I could not pull out of the stockpile to use.  I am most pleased with the fact that we used a lot of items already on hand and even with the additional purchase stayed under budget for November.  Total time this year was probably 10 hours. I was up at midnight finishing up the meals but we did not receive the chicken until 4pm and had to stop for over an hour to get the kids dinner and baths on Saturday.

A total of 277.09 was used for the 70  meals that we created.  Here is the list of items that we have mostly frozen for use in the next year.

12 bags of grilled chicken- we doubled the portion of each bag with the idea that we can always use the leftovers for salads, wraps and sandwiches. I actually counted these as 24 meals.
5 bags of raw chicken breast cut into normal size portions.
18 bags of shredded chicken- each bag contains 2 cups. Let me just add that I LOVE my Kitchen Aid mixer for this.
5 meal of crockpot chicken- 1 pineapple chicken, 2 café rio chicken and 2 garlic lime chicken. The recipes are linked here.
2 meals of chicken enchiladas– We had one for our lunch today and it was AWESOME!
4 Chicken Broccoli casseroles-check the recipe tab if you are interested.
4 Chicken pie bases- the tops will be added the day we cook.
8 Frozen chicken fried rice meals.

Low Spend/No Spend Failure

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I knew it would happen. Every time I decided that I am going to try and keep our spending to a minimum  something always seems to come up. This month it was shoes.

All three of the little kids needed shoes this past week. So we ended up spending most of last Sunday, shopping for shoes. We were able to find 4 new pair of shoes, Kendall was the lucky recipient of two pair, for $95.  I don’t think that our shoe problems has been entirely solved but at least they have been pushed back for the moment. I anticipate that both Lily and Kendall will need new boots this year but for now they are fine wearing what shoes they have. I will also need to buy a pair of new shoes for work  but my plan is to wait till we are in Michigan and attempt to go to the Nike outlet for those.   The other unexpected cost this month are directly related to home repair and upkeep. As a home owner, things wear out and need to be repaired and updates as is the case with our house this month. So I am going to declare that I am a failure at this low spend month.

However I am thinking in the long range, I may actually meet most of our set financial goals for the month.  We currently have spent $320 of our $600 grocery budget. This  does include our Costco membership that I thought I had paid in September. I don’t see any other large purchase for this month so I expect to stay around $350 total for the month. In other good budget news, gas prices have significantly dropped in the last week. I saw prices today at less than $3 a gallon. This should allow us to stay under our $400 a month gas budget. Anything left for the month will be used for our Michigan trip, which will also be reduced if gas prices decide to stay at this level.

In some  other good budget news, we have been able to increase our income for the month by selling a couple of items, a $20 rebate from P&G, a refund of $70 for my weight loss challenge and Matt has picked up some additional work as well.

 

CVS Shopping

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I made a couple of stops at CVS this week and am super excited to share what I was able to purchase for $9!

I guess the first thing to explain is why I made 2 separate trips. I usually on Friday go ahead and check out Southern Savers to put together and print out my shopping list for CVS. Because of my attempt to stay on budget for September and October, I decided to wait until at least Wednesday before shopping. I just added the list and coupons in my purse. I ended up with a little bit of extra time on Wednesday so I decided to stop at a different CVS.  The first thing that made this a great trip was that quarterly ECB printed on Wednesday as well. I was able to save an additional $6 by using the ones that print for the fall quarter. I also did not realize that Twizzlers were part of the printable deal for the week so I had not found any coupons for them on Wednesday when I stopped.  I was able to locate several excellent coupons on Wednesday night. Twizzlers are Matt’s favorite candy so once he found out that I was going to be purchasing Twizzlers he was ok with making a quick stop during our busy Thursday.

Now to the fun stuff! I spent $9, and saved $53 or 86%.  I was able to purchase 9 bags of candy including 3 bags of Twiizzlers and 2 pack of Listerine Pocket pacs!   I have hidden most of the candy so that we can use for Halloween at the end of the month!  I just could not pass up a deal for candy at less than $1 a bag!

Unfortunately I have already looked at the list for CVS starting on Sunday and don’t even plan a trip this week. But since we are stocked up on candy it is not a loss!

Thursday Random, Budget Related Thoughts

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I made the comment last week that September was turning into a very expensive month. I am relieved to say that things have calmed down a bit and although it will still be an expensive over all month, I am hoping that we can stay on track budget wise.

As of today, I have spent $380 of our $600 monthly grocery budget. This does include a 120# of chicken from Zaycon food, that will not be picked up until mid-October. I currently am planning to do a freezer cooking day with my BFF on Saturday which will add somewhere between $50 to $100 to the budget. This will give us another 10 crock pot meal for use as well. I am expecting $20 in rebate cards from my stock up of Tide Detergent. I will be using this as they come in and moving $20 into our special saving funds, which I will explain in a minute. I also have $7 left on a gift card from CVS. My goal for the rest of the month is to speed as little as possible on groceries. I will definitely be under budget this month, the only question will be by how much?

Currently we have $240 remaining in our gas budget for the month. I estimate we will need to use at least $180 of this but should be able to hang on to the remaining $60.

I was able to finish out Zach’s clothing needs for the fall by purchasing some clothes from a friend!  She has the next size up as well so if Zach decides to grow I have an option to purchase  without breaking the budget again.

The weather has been very usually in North Carolina this week. Beginning on the 7th, we have not used out central air. I am so excited about this, I have been keeping a close eye on the weather and realized that today (Thursday) was the warmest out of the week. The temperature did get up in the high 80’s and the temperature in the house was sitting at 84, but we survived and with a cold front passing through along with rain, our goal is to make it at least 2 weeks without central air in September. We are usually able to enjoy a lower electricity bill for October and November so this should generate some nice savings for us.

Now for the announcement of where these savings are headed.  We would like to make a trip to Michigan to visit with Matt’s family over the Thanksgiving holiday. However, after much discussion and a hard look at our budget, we agree that in order to make this trip we will need to save around $1800 for the trip. So we are both search for any extra money in our budget in addition to searching for extra ways to earn money. For us this is a lofty goal for an 8 week period but I am excited to see where this challenge leads us!

 

Thursday Shopping

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We need to have a couple of pairs of glasses worked on in Winston this week so after checking out a couple of ads, I decided we would make a couple of stops to coupon as well. Overall I am very pleased and actually think this is one of my better savings trips overall.

First stop was Harris Teeter- I spent $14 and saved $65 or 82%   This include 5 packs of Oscar Myer hot dogs for $0.51 each, 2 cups of Greek yogurts-free, Laughing Cow Cheese and hair products!

The second stop was at Target- I spent $27 and saved $50 with $3.00 remaining on a gift card. The saving was 65%, however because Target prices are lower than most this is actually a huge deal. My purchased included 10 boxes of cereal, 5 2L drinks, 2 packs of juice boxes, 4 Rev sandwich  wraps, a couple packs of cookie dough and some school supplies.

Finally stop was Home Depot.  I do have a Home Depot Credit Card and usually use it to make purchases for the house. Over the last two years, I have not paid any interest or fees to this card so I am not opposed to use it. I received in the mail on Thursday a 10% your entire purchase coupon. We were able to purchase a new gas grill for less than $150 combining this coupon and a great sale. I am not even sure how to calculate the saving but wanted to include it so that you know to watch your mail and use what companies send you!

I do want to mention one more stop we made but it was actually in Lexington. We went to the Food Lion to pick up some pasta salad mixes for Zach’s birthday party. We had excellent timing and walked in just as the meat was being reduced. So we decided to go ahead and grab what looked good and we knew we could use. This ended up being around $110 of meat including hamburger, beef and chicken. At first you might think this is not a great deal but in addition to the hamburger we already have this should be enough meat for us till mid to late October.

Overall I am very pleased with this shopping day!

 

Sunday Shopping and Saving 8/17/2014

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Today is  the first official day of my vacation, but even so I did manage to enjoy both hopping and saving. Because my children, especially Kendall, are early risers we had planned to eat two meals out  today.  My mother gave me a coupon for Golden Corral, and we made this our first stop this morning. The coupon was for adult breakfast buffets which include your choice of milk, juice or coffee. The hostess also gave us the coupon price for the kid’s buffet as well, which means that all six of us ate for $35.  We found a really quick route to the beach and arrive in plenty of time for lunch. Actually, we shopped first because we had so much time. I had printed just in case the coupon for Outback Steakhouse, so we decided to splurge and enjoy this as well. We did end up spending $70 including tip but not bad considering the adults all had steak and the kids ended up finishing their meals for dinner.

We stopped at the Tanger Outlets but  only hit a couple of stores. Old Navy advertised an awesome sale and we were excited to find lots of items on the $5 tables however over half of these items did not ring up for $5 so we left disappointed.  I picked up several polo shirts for Zach and a pair of jeans as well. The Disney Store  was the kids choice, each of the three little kids has been saving money and doing extra chores for the past  two months and were excited to purchase some toys today. I was able to take advantage of the $10 pajama sale for all three little kids and myself. Matt found a cool shirt for under $10 so in the end, everyone was happy!

I had planned on saying this was going to be our most expensive day, however we are going to a dinner theater  tomorrow evening. I have already purchased the ticket so it is budgeted and covered but still really expensive!

Shopping Savings

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I have been able to get in some extra shopping over the past couple of days, so I thought I would share with you. I was able to pick up several items, including Lunchables to use in the girls lunches as they head back to school. Stocking up on these at $1.00 each is much better for us than the $2.85 a day for lunch at school. I am sure that as the year goes on we will be back to packing our own lunch combo but these are definitely worth the convenience at the stock up price.

Magic Mart– Not sure how wide spread this store is but I found some awesome deals yesterday with no coupons.
Hunt Pudding packs- $0.88
Lays Stax (Blue containers)  Barbecue or Sour Cream/Onion $0.88
Reese Peanut Butter 8 packs $1.03

Walmart–  I hate this store but need to pick up a birthday gift and decided to use some coupons while I was there.
Notebook Paper- $0.75 each- Not the best price but much cheaper than $1.59 which is the regular price.
Lunchables $1.00 each
Suave Kid’s Shampoo- $1.50 each, printable coupon $1.00 off so $0.50 each (I got two)
Mitchum Deodorant-$2.97-  $2.00 off coupon paid $0.97.  This is one of the few items I remain brand loyal to so I try to always buy at less than $1.00
Hawaiian Punch- $1.98- coupon for $1.00 off so I picked up two for $0.98 each
Minute Maid Juice- half gallon on sale 4 for $5, two $1.00 off 2 coupons and submitted to get a Walmart gift card $5.  I will update when I actually receive this gift card.  Even without the gift card less than $1 each.

Target– My favorite store!  I love the way they let you combine coupons. Read more about it here.
Sharpie Highlighters- 2 pack, $1.98 each, Mobile coupon for $1.00 off two. Ending up being $0.98
Scotch Tape- $1.02- Target Coupon for $1.00 off.
Post- It notes $0.99- Target coupon for $1.00 off
BIC mechanical pencils (8 count) $0.99 each, Target coupon for $1.00 off 2.
Skippy Peanut Butter Singles (6 pack) – $2.60- 30% off with cartwheel and $0.75 off 2 from newspaper.
Lunchables- Buy 5 get 5 free final price $0.75 each.
Light weight Gray jacket for Zach $5.00

CVS– I decided against working a $10 gift card deal this week. I am trying to save money for the beach and although the deals were good they were not rock bottom and honestly we didn’t need any so I just picked up the mandatory diet cokes and cereal.
Cinnamon Toast Crunch Cereal- 2 for $4, with 1 ECB with the purchase of 2. I had two  $0.50 off one coupons, plus a $0.50 deposit into my saving star account. They ended up being $1 a box so my buy price.

 

The biggest reward I got this weekend is by catching in my Saving Star money. This is a simple app that is tied to your individual reward cards or can be used by scanning in Walmart receipts as well. I had $12.15 deposit in my checking account on Saturday from this!