All this for $44.00

Sorry for another picture of my groceries, but I am still amazed at what a little bit of pre-planning your grocery trip and actually reading the ads can do. I used to see the Oprah shows where people would pay 50 - 60% less on their groceries after the sales and coupons, but I just didn't see how that could happen with the few .25 and .50 coupons I would get! Now I understand that it's not just going into the grocery store and buying whatever you need, it's going into the grocery store armed with the sales and additional coupons to make the sale items even cheaper. Before the Safeway Club Card, weekly Ad coupons and the regular newspaper coupons the cost of this was $106.80, I walked out paying $44.00, I like saving 60% on my groceries!


I pretty much shop at Winco so it has been years since I have even looked at the weekly sales ads that come in the Tuesday paper, (now if they came on Sunday I would have probably looked at them more!) Winco has some great prices overall, some things really cheap, some average, I figured it all balanced out, and I would still try and buy what is on sale and use a coupon here or there if I happened to be able to find it, before it expired and it actually made it to the store with me! But lately I have really been seeing the benefit of checking the ads for the more expensive stores! This week Safeway had coupons for $10.00 off if you spent $50.00 or more, a coupon for .99 for a pound of butter, a free liter of Pepsi (not show, left in the garage fridge), and a coupon for a box of Raisin Bran or Frosted Mini Wheats for .99. All great deals, plus I had a coupon for .70 off of the cereal, so I paid all of .24 for the Raisin Bran, now that's a great deal!

I matched my Safeway ad with coupon moms site to locate my weekly newspaper coupons with Safeways weekly sales. This site will bring up the weekly sales and then tell you were to find the newspaper coupons, you can then check the box of the items you want, print your list and then cut out your coupons (I save them every week in a binder, but that's another post). The trick to all of this is to only buy what is on your list, (well, unless you find a great deal that you might have missed!) otherwise I think that the effort to save some money will go out the door. Oh, and the other trick is to go to the store alone, so you don't have little helper asking for things that are not on your list!

Now I am getting a nice little stock pile of pantry items and some extra meat in the freezer, and I am finding that we don't need as much week to week, I have items in the pantry/freezer to pull from and I can continue to buy what happens to be on sale each week.