Shopping Victory

Some of you loyal readers may remember some of the great grocery shopping victories we've had in the past. Well, we have had some more success! I have posted a few directly to Facebook (thanks to my smartphone) but I figured I'd blog about this one today as a few people on Facebook have asked "how I do it".



Well, there is no real secret to it. The key is to take a little time and plan. Each week we get a packet of all of the "shoppers" for the grocery stores in the area. We usually page through them and just browse to see what the good deals are to see what jumps out. After the first browse-through I will hop online to check out the lists from Money Saving Mom for each store's great deals for that week. It's a really great resource because she lists the sale price and which coupons to use. If the coupons are available to print online, the link will be there too. (She lists weekly deals for a lot of stores so chances are, your local store will be there.) After I look at those deals I will go through the sales again and see what we need and see if we have coupons for those items.


Here is this week's victory purchase:
Total: $8.70 plus $13.00 towards our next purchase, 2 recyclable shopping bags and 2 RedBox movie free rental codes!

How I did it: This week ShopRite is running a "Dollar Days" sale where buying certain amounts of specific company/brand items will yield you a certificate for money towards your next purchase. One of the companies was General Mills. The deal was if you bought 12 General Mills items you got a $10 certificate for your next purchase. I happened to still have a bunch of coupons for free boxes of Honey Nut Cheerios that I won through an online promotion. This made the big difference. (We go through a lot of cereal so 5 boxes isn't too much for us to have in our pantry.) I also had coupons for all of the other General Mills products I selected too so I knew it was worth the deal to get the $10.00 back. Unilever was also a part of the Dollar Days promotion. If you bought 6 of the items, you got $3 for your next purchase. I got 3 Ragus and 3 pasta sides to fill out those 6 items because I had coupons for each.

After a minor setback (leaving my wallet at home....oops! Thankfully Eddie works pretty close to this store so he hopped over quickly to pay!), we got the total. The total should have been a little higher because the Cheerios coupons took off the full price of the cereal (vs. their sale price for the week) but the total came to $8.70. As I noted above, I also have $13.00 to spend on our next purchase at the store. I will use it towards some of the meat for our next week of meals. As a fun bonus, we have two free reusable grocery bags (which get you 5 cents off your order for each one you use....not much but every cent counts!) and two codes for movie rentals through RedBox.

I'm pretty pleased with how it went today and know that while every trip to the grocery store will be this good, every dollar counts on a budget!

All in all, totally worth the extra time and planning.