After more than 6 months of silence here on the family blog, this will seem like an odd post but we have to start somewhere. I hope to catch you up but I have learned to not make promises I may not be able to keep.
One of the things keeping me busy is couponing and trying to do magic with the family food budget. It is a game to see how many food/household/cleaning/toiletry items I can get for the least amount of money out of pocket. Today was a good day at the grocery store. Here is a photo of some of the things we purchased.
Yes, those are 20 boxes of cereal. On
http://www.coupons.com/ there are several .75 coupons for new cereals from General Mills. They happen to be on sale this week at Tops for 2.50 a box so after doubling the coupons, they are only $1 a box. That is a stock up price in our house since the 3 guys are rather addicted to cereal. Tops also had 8oz POM juice for $1 a bottle, free after $1 coupons in today's paper (as well as some a few weeks ago and some on-line). I also purchased 14 Hot Pockets Snackers, .50 each (free after $1/2 internet printable coupons) and 4 yogurt packs for lunches.
Total retail of my shopping trip today $142.60 (gulp!!)
Total paid $24.60
83% savings
I also earned another .40/per gallon off our gas by using so many coupons. We are up to $1.10 off a gallon so far.
I average between 50%-65% off most trips so this was indeed a good day.
Greg left today for another round of classes in Charlotte so the boys and I had a taste test of the 3 new cereals by GM.
On a scale of 1-10...
Frosted Toast Crunch scored a 5, 7, 7
Dulce de Leche Cheerios scored a 6, 5, 5
Mulitgrain Cheerios with Peanut Butter scored all 8's!
None of them horrible, which is good since we have several boxes of each, lol. The Multigrain Cheerios with PB was by far the favorite. Not a strong PB taste and a nice crunch.
With a new year ahead of us, it is a good time to set some savings goals. I will be trying to tighten our food budget by another $25-$50 a week in the months ahead. I think I can...
