So, my pantry challenge is coming along nicely. Ethan had soup for lunch today and I had chicken salad. Between the two of us we removed two more cans from the pantry and one container (of veggies) from the frig. Now granted, there was some soup left over, but he's only 20 months old I can't expect him to eat an entire can of soup, half a can of veggies, and half a can of chicken!
So I did buy some groceries today to make spaghetti sauce with the meat that I defrosted from my freezer. I plan on now for the next two weeks focusing on only buying one or two ingredients for each recipe I want to make so that I can continue to widdle down our stock pile.
In the meantime I have gotten serious about shopping for sales! My friend Betsy showed me last week how to look up sale flyers from our local grocery stores online. I don't have time to clip coupons, but I am always online and it just takes a few seconds to pull each store's ads up and plan my menu from there. I even pulled up Walmart's flyer this morning and found Gala apples on sale for .99 a pound!
She also sent me cool blog sites where these SAHMs write about their serious coupon habits! One of the best ones was about this family who was living on $1500 a year for groceries, medical co-pays, and one other category. Sadly thier blog has been removed from the internet because of threats to the family. How weird is that? Anyway, one of the cool things she had on her blog was a maximum price list for things she often bought at the grocery store. You could tell she was really intense because a lot of the maximum prices were $0.00. She acheived those prices through sales, coupons, and stores that double your coupons (who knew?).
I tried to start my own price book to get an idea what normal, sale, and over priced prices look like, but since I lean towards the technology end in all areas of my life I've decided to start my own price book in an excel spread sheet. The neat thing is that it will show me the max price, min price, and average price for the things I buy most often at the grocery store. You can even have a look at what I have so far.
Let me know if you find some good deals in the Knoxville area and I'll add them to my sheet.
1 comment:
I would say I do the "pantry challenge" every other week or so because I'll over spend my grocery money one week and will be forced to eat from the pantry the next.
no squirrels here.
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