Category Archives: Coupons

Extreme Couponing

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I was really surprised to discover that I had not been to CVS since before Christmas, in fact, my ECBs expire this week. The reason behind my long absence has been simple, no really deals that I wanted/needed to grab.  This week was a huge change. I started the trip with 2 $0.89 ECB. I also received $2 ECB for winter spending on Matt’s card.

Here is a breakdown by the numbers
5 total transactions,( one of my card and four on Matt’s).
$7.88 total spent
$84.72 total saved of 91% with taxes included and 95% taking out the $3.68 of sales tax
$6.50 in ECB left.

I purchased:
6 12 pack of Coke (Used 6 free 12 pack coupons from my Coke rewards)
4 packs of M&M ( used 2 Buy One Get One Free coupons)
2 2L Liters (used a 0.24 coupon that printed from red machine)
4 Bottles so L’Oreal Shampoo ( used 2- $4/2 from 01/03)
2  Packages of Crest Sensi strips.

 

This is one for the record books!  My total grocery spending is less than $12 for the month so far!  I did make a trip to the building today to check out what we have in the freezers and did a little bit of organizing so we can get our pork order from Zaycon tomorrow. We have enough of a variety with the pork order that I am going to say we are going to plan on coming in under goal for this month of $200 and reduce the grocery spending in February to $500. That will get us totally on the right foot with groceries and may in fact help to control/reduce grocery spending for the year!

Food For Thought-

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Today is my Mom’s birthday, which means we are fast approaching the end of the year. I am already in the process of looking and working on a budget for 2016. I will do a final update and set new goals hopefully this week but today I want to focus on Food.

  • Menu planning is still happening although I have not been posting the last couple of weeks have been about a couple of special meals and using up leftovers. This week we have already had a meal using meatballs my sister in law brought, tonight we made a roast and used some the sides we had left-over and tomorrow the plan is to use and make pork fried rice from leftover Christmas Eve shoulder. I am also adding some “convenient” meals to the freeze with the extra time we have this week.
  • Our grocery spending for the month is close to $900 which is way over budget. I have been taking advantage of some sells and stocking up, in addition to some extra meals and appetizers.
  • Our average monthly grocery spending for the year is at $691.59. I am totally amazed and excited for this number as it is under my $700 a month that I started in July.
  • I have been looking into some “average” numbers for grocery spending for our size family a “thrifty” plan is $770 and a “Low” plan is $1028 per month.
  • After finding these numbers I am very comfortable with maintaining our grocery spending to $700 a month. I am going to continue to focus on each month but not beat myself up for spending over now that I know it averages out within the year!
  • I was also able to find that the “average” family spends about $200 a month on eating out. In the past, I have not budgeted anything for eating out but this will become a regular expense in the year 2016.
  • We are starting the year with lots of meat in the freezer. I have already paid for 80# of pork that Matt will pick up the first week of January. We also just recently purchased chicken and a large order of ground beef. I am hopefully to not purchase any additional meat until March.
  • Our garden this year did well and we have been enjoying a variety of things. We have enlarged the garden to it’s capacity and hopefully will be able to multiply our freezing stock for the year.
  • I did not even attempt to lose weight with our trip to Disney and the holidays so I will back on track with eating healthier again in January.
  • Total random thought but at least it is food related. I just received in the mail a total of 6 free 12 packs expiring March 31. I will hold on till CVS offers ECBs or I just need them.

Saving on Sunday 11/15/2015

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Lily and I made a quick before church trip to CVS this morning. I said it was my practice trip for next Sunday, when CVS “Black Friday” ad will start. Check out what we scored.

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Total Spent was $4.84 with a total saving of $15 or 75%. I will also receive 5 ECB for Beauty club purchases next week as well. I LOVE rain checks and today demonstrates why. I used one from several weeks ago to grab the 2L Diet Coke which were paid for by the 4 ECB I received after purchasing the shampoo and conditioner. My only regret from today is that I did not have but one set of coupons because of a problem with paper delivery for the past two weeks.

Other ways that I have been saving this week  is my using my Amazon prime membership. I have purchased several items and most of my Christmas gifts on line this year. One option that is appearing is to receive a credit to either the “pantry” or movies if you chose the no rush shipping. We have chose this option each time it has been offered because we are really not in a hurry for the purchase.  Friday night we decided to use one of our movie credit to watch the movie “Home” it was so fun and the kids enjoyed at well. So money saved all around!

Saving at CVS

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After several weeks of no really good reason to shop at CVS on Sunday, I was excited to go in today.  I will start with the explanation that Matt actually made a quick stop at CVS on Thursday to purchase some deodorant. He ended up receiving both a $1 ECB for the last quarter and $5 ECB for beauty club spending.

By the numbers:
5 transactions (3 on Matt’s card and 2 on my card)
2 bag of candy corn. These are at the request of Zach’s teacher so even on sale they are not items we would normally purchase.
3 bottles of shampoo
1 bottle of conditioner
10 2L of soda (8 of which were Diet Coke)
1 piece of caramel- (Need to use my ECB)

Total spent $12.69
Total saved $37 or 75%
ECB remaining 1

By far the best deal of the day was Treseme’ Shampoo and Conditioner.  I purchased 3 bottles of Shampoo and 1 bottle of Conditioner, used 2- $5/2 coupons that expired today 10/11 and my 5 ECB from Beauty club. Total out of pocket including tax was $1.77 or   44 cent each!

Menu Planning and other Rambling Thoughts

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We have really implemented menu planning into our regular routine, Saturday morning after breakfast. This is one of the few times Matt and I can actually sit down and discuss what we want to cook, look in the pantry and cabinets without being in a rush. This morning we also talked about trying to “clean out the freezers as much as possible” prior to our Disney Trip. I don’t usually worry about the freezers in the building as I do about something happening to the smaller freezers in the house.  The plan/goal currently is to eat and use as much as possible in the next 54 days and only pay small amounts of food if needed with no big stock ups.  I honestly don’t thing this is very hard as I was really deliberate about buying and completely restocking our pantry and freezers this past week. We also have already order 80# of chicken, which will be picked up the first week of November. Honestly at this point I don’t even have room to place this chicken anywhere. I am also considering placing a ground beef order for December but this will depend heavily and freezer space as well.

Now on to the planning

Breakfast–  Homemade Breakfast bowls, Pancakes, toast with  jelly, yogurt,  cereal, poptarts, and grits will be out breakfast for the week. Saturday morning- tenderloin, eggs, grits and gravy. Sunday morning- Baked oatmeal( need to decide what kind in the near future.”

Lunch- .The kids were all excited that we bought “uncrustables” this week at Costco, along with grab lunches. I am going to be taking left-overs every day.

Dinner- During the week, things are fairly busy with an activity every night but Friday but we are keeping with the plan!

Saturday- Lunch: BBQ chicken plates              Dinner- Oyster stew or leftovers.

Sunday- Lunch- Baked potatoes, cream corn, Paula Deen mac and cheese.    Dinner-Leftovers or cowboy beans depending on how full the fridge is.

Monday- Salisbury steak, rice, green beans and fruit.
Tuesday- Pizza bites or eating at school even.
Wednesday-Spaghetti and meatballs
Thursday-  Chicken fried rice
Friday- Chicken nuggets and French fries.

 

I am attending a ladies conference next Friday night and Saturday so Matt and the kids will be figuring something out for these days.

5 Things Friday

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1. Just because I like to be a rule breaker, I am going to post my saving on Saturday, in today’s list!  Amazon was running an awesome deal on Amazon Prime- $67 for a year’s membership. Matt helped us to join today. This will save us $4 a month starting in January because of the kid’s Kindle subscription. So we are going to enjoy free shipping, movies, music and books for $31 or $2.58 a month.

2. Our Menu plan this week was side track by a couple of things. First, a person at church is growing some awesome peppers and was generous enough to share these. We ended up having Pepper Steak on Sunday afternoon and Chicken Fajitas on Thursday. The second change was due to me locating a container of grilled chicken on Wednesday. Because I did not want for this to get wasted we had chicken fajitas on Thursday instead of shrimp and a awesome chicken pot pie on Friday.

3. This coming week will be the most challenging for our budget. So far for the month of October we are less than $10 over gas and groceries(which I cut to $300).  We already have a menu plan in place so my goal is to stay the course and celebrate an awesome successful month!

4.I have absolutely no plans for tomorrow. My goal is to not leave the house all day!

5.The kids had an early release day today and were picked up from school at 12 noon. I am very proud to say that so far this year, no one has missed a day of school or received a tardy. FIRST TIME EVER!

 

5 Things Friday

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1. I am staying in a hotel room tonight, as I attended a continuing education class from 8-5:30 today and will be in class again from 8 till 1:30 tommorow as well. This is the first time since I think Zach was born that I have been away from the kids an entire night.  We are very fortunate to have FaceTime so they are not so far away.

2. I was so very excited to be able to fund all our budget catogeries this month. We are focusing on keeping our expenses low and making any extra payment we can toward our Disney trip.

3. I am going to have another yard sale next Saturday, I am hoping to sell $100 worth of stuff and that money will also go into the Disney fund.

4. Yesterday online I found an awesome coupon for $25 off a $50 purchase at Advance Auto. We decide to go ahead and purchase some items to complete some maintence on Matt’s van. None of the items were emergencies but the goal is to keep his van in the best shape so we can drive for the next 5 years.

5. Zach is having a really good year so far at school with his behavior being some of the best in the class! Kendall also had a great day today with achieve “Gold” status after getting in trouble on Wednesday. I am praying this is the postive up swing she needs!

Saving on Saturday August 8th

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These are the items that I was able to purchase last week at CVS. My favorite deal was purchasing 2 boxes of cereal, 2 shampoos and a bottle of hand soap for $0.40. The reason this was possible was that I received an “extra” 5 ECB for reaching $50 in beauty care spending. I used that in conjunction with the 5 ECB for purchasing $20 in P&G products from last week.  When you combine all the transactions 5 in total I spent around $8 and saved 81%.  The sharpies are going to finish up Zach birthday gift (autograph books for Disney). All the other items when in my beach stock.(More details on these hopefully later in the week.

I made several additional shopping trips this week to grab up “Lunchables” which we will use at the beach for lunches and for easy school lunches to get us back in the swing in a couple of weeks.  My best grocery deal this week came at Food Lion. I had to make a shopping trip to purchase baby food to use at work, I did use a $1.50 coupon that printed at the machine, At the end of the transaction, the regrister also printed a $3.00 catalina. I used this to purchase bread flour for $.25.

I have also started to play around and use the ibotta and checkout 51 apps. So far that have been fairly simple to use and I am not purchasing items that are not already on my list, so ever little bit helps. This week alone I earned $0.75 at Checkout 51 and 5.35 at Ibbota,

What have you been doing to save money?

Saving on Sunday

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sosOpps!  You are right today is Sunday. I did not get much saving done yesterday because we spent most of the day enjoying the pool.  Kendall had a friend in addition to Lily having a friend spend the night so I got not a lot accomplished except for spending time with the kids. I am starting to realize and trying to enjoy more time just hanging out with the little kids, I know in a flash they will be too busy to hang out! Now back to saving. I did do some shopping today, even with all three little kids in tow. Matt is working for cheerleading so I decided the sales were good enough and we needed most items.

First stop today was CVS. It has been 3 weeks since I last went to CVS, I hope they will not be having another test market of no sales ad in the near future. Today I purchased 7 bottles of shampoo, a bottle of detangle, 2 bottles of Tide free and clear, 4 bottles of body wash,2 sticks of deodorant and a battery powered toothbrush for $36 with a 65% saving, I also have 10 ECB to use in the future.

We also stopped by Aldi to grab fresh produce including cantaloupe, watermelon, grapes and cottage cheese that I need for a recipe. Total spent at Aldi was 18.47

We are continuing to get lots of tomatoes from the garden. I have managed to replenish the shelf of stewed tomatoes and discovered an awesome recipe for spaghetti sauce. I adapted it to the crockpot and hopefully will make at least a batch a week for the month of August. Currently, I am freezing in containers to make Baked Ziti with. My plan is to make 12 of these  and then just freeze spaghetti sauce, even the kids say this is the best sauce they have eaten.

How did you save this month?

 

Growing Our Stockpile

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My primary area of focus for the month of July is going to be to grow/replenish our stockpile. The only constraint is the $700 food budget.

The rationale behind this decision has several different aspects. First, July should be the month in which our garden produces the most. Next, and more importantly is that we are running low on items that can no longer be neglected. As we made our menu list for the week, we realized that 4 of 7 meals were going to be chicken. Zaycon also notified us this week of a change in the delivery date of our ground beef order, unfortunately this is our week of vacation.

Our first stop was the “local” meat processing plant- Shuler Meats. We ended up purchasing $230 worth of meat. This may seem extremely high but in reality this meat in addition to the chicken we already have will last 3-4 months.  We purchased 30# of ground beef, chicken drumsticks, NY strip Steaks, cube steak, round roast, beef stew and sausage. Looking at the numbers we have enough meat for 47 meals, that is an average of less than $5 a meal or less than $1 a person per meal. Wondering what we did with all this, glad you asked!  We took 20# of the ground beef and fried it up, freezing it in 1# packs for use in many common recipes and for quick meals like tacos and hamburger helper. The other 10# we made into “Salisbury steaks”.

We have also made trips to Aldi, Costco and Food Lion in the last two days as well. Aldi had an awesome deal on blueberries so I have froze several pints of these for future use. I also purchased a couple of bags of dried beans that have been cooked and frozen. Throwing away food is the biggest waste of money in the US, so I ended up steaming and freezing spinach as well as a bag of apples that became fried apples/apple pie filling to prevent their waste.

Out of our garden, we are getting an abundance of cucumbers, I have made several batches of “cucumber relish” and discovered an awesome recipe for “refrigerator pickles” that the kids love so I currently have 3 gallons of these. Tomatoes are one of the easiest items for me, I simple dice and cook we use these for any recipe that calls for diced tomatoes, tomato sauce or stewed tomatoes. I have even been known to add seasoning to these for recipes that call for Italian style tomatoes. I am able to finish and freeze at least one batch ever couple of day.

The final and smallest way, I am growing our stockpile this month is couponing. I am determined to stick to our budget but hope to add a couple of snack foods for future list if the right sale occurs. Do you have any plans to grow your stockpile this summer?