If you know JJ or I in person you have probably heard us bragging about my grocery shopping adventures. Ever since JJ and I have been married we have spent far less than average on groceries but only buying the minimum our family needed. I recently became addicted to combining coupons and sales to get fantastic deals. Some people ask how I find the time to do this but the truth is the people over at pinchingyourpennies.com help me save a lot of time by letting us know where the best deals are.
There are several bloggers I visit that reveal their grocery budget and everything they buy to help their readers save money like they do. I thought this would be lots of fun to do as well and also help me get a better idea of how often certain items are on sale. Blogging about it would be more fun than writing it on a piece of paper that I will probably loose.
Anyways we have a grocery budget of $150 a month. Yes, for a family of 4! I feel great that we can keep this low of a budget for our family however we do use cloth diapers and our children are on the WIC program so this helps us keep a low grocery budget.
There have been some very incredible deals this week. After today’s grocery shopping adventure which I will share in this post we still have $103.85 in our budget.
Today I went to Walgreen this is what I bought:
Peanut M&M’s and Peanut Butter M&M’s (JJ’s fathers day gift!), Package of tissues, Crackers, flavoured bottle water, St. Ives body wash, John Freida shampoo, conditioner and curling products.
Retails: $33.61
Sales – $8.35
Coupons – $19.50
Total spent : $5.76
Plus I recieved $9 in register rewards to use at Walgreens within the next two weeks.
Albertsons today:
2 boxes of cherrios, 3 boxes of Golden Grahams, 4 boxes of Total Cereal, Chex Mix trail mix, 2 bags of green giant vegetable steamers with sauce, Breyers all natural ice cream.
Retails: $52.27
Sales – $25.77
Coupons – $20.75
Total Spent: $6.45
Plus I received a $10 off coupon to use at Albertsons within the next two weeks.
June 15th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Wow, you are good! Where do you get the coupons? Just from Sunday papers or from online too? I really need to learn to shop like that.
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Melissa Reply:
June 15th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
We don’t have a printer right now so I just use coupons from the sunday paper, in store coupons and coupons I receive by signing up for mailing lists and freebies.
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June 15th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Wow, that’s awesome. do you just like look online for coupons?? I can’t believe how much you saved!!!
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Melissa Reply:
June 15th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
I don’t know a whole lot about couponing in Canada but I have heard that some Canadian newspapers have coupon inserts once a month and there are online coupon sites like save.ca.
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June 16th, 2009 at 11:41 am
Wow! Thats alot of Cereal .. haha, thats great that you can buy that much food and save so much. Yeah, http://www.Save.Ca is my favourite source for coupons and combining them with “weekly specials” on items from superstore, I usually always get my gillett shaving cream for free
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Melissa Reply:
June 16th, 2009 at 11:55 am
You need to start a smart grocery shopping blog for Canadians!
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June 17th, 2009 at 8:05 am
[...] Melissa: You need to start a smart grocery… [...]
June 19th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
I checked out the links and none have stores in our area. I have to search locally.
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Melissa Reply:
June 24th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
You’re right there isn’t much info about your area. I’ll see if I can find a website that will be useful for you. If you want to try this just get the sunday paper and match coupons with sales. If you get 2 papers you can use two coupons for buy 1 get one free deals!
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