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.

This is the third and final week of the challenge this time. One of the most exciting parts of the challenge was going out to our building tonight to  shop in the freezers. We will be picking up our 80# of chicken breast in 3 weeks and are really trying to make space for it. So tonight we pull out 2 weeks worth of meat items, I think* that this will leave enough space for the chicken now.

Now on to the shopping. I have not been really impressed with CVS lately and for the first two weeks of the challenge was simply using a gift card to purchase some items. So for this week, I had $30 to use at CVS. This week the were running a P&G promotion which included my only brand loyal item “Tide”, so of course I decided to stock up. I spent $21 and saved $38 or 65%.  Harris Teeter has a couple of awesome sales this week on cereal, so instead of Food Lion, I placed an order there. I also had to go to CVS because Matt and the kids have been sick all week and the medicine cabinet was empty. I ended up spending $35 between the two stores, saved $98 or 74%!  This week I have spent a total of $56 on grocery items so a fail again with the challenge!

I seriously doubt I will attempt another challenge for the rest of the year. We are currently planning a trip to Michigan in November as well as travel at least one weekend a month between quizzing and cheerleading. But I am hoping to continue to lower the amount we are spending on groceries so that by January, I can reduce our budget for groceries overall.