Photo: SXC

I do want to let you know that if you have a Mars grocery store near you, you should keep a close eye on their produce clearance cart. I get tons of limes, pears, apples and bananas that are just ready to eat off my local cart if I stop in Sunday or Monday. I’m talking about pounds of stuff for a few dollars. I also get cheap rolls there – $1.69 for fresh baked, incredibly soft blunt rolls.)

Target deals to keep an eye out for are clearanced popcorn (Pop Secret was on clearance if you have coupons.) and holiday Oreos in a blue package with snowflakes on it.

How did you do this week?

Here you can Save on Back-to-School Groceries

Photo: Vangelis Thomaidis/SXC

What did I get?
Gallon of milk 3.60
Ton of tea from Amazon 16.00
Dinner out $7
Trip to Martin’s $22.65

• 2 bags of chips (Buy 1, Get 1 Free)
• Paper towels (I try to use rags when possible, but I haven’t been able to cut them out completely.)
• Macaroni salad
• 7 Banquet frozen meals (Only $2 total after instant savings. I had a coupon off 6, so I only spent 80 cents total on them. Look hard at the fat and calorie content. Most of them are pretty high in both, but there were a few that weren’t too terrible.)
• 2 Dr. Oetker pizzas (Best pizza in the world. I like the spinach pizza the best.)
• Foot long Italian sub

Free food – The really nice farmer my brother helps out when he can gave us a ton of yams fresh from the ground last week, my mom gave me some apples because the packing house was overly generous with her box of seconds and my sister stopped in at the bread outlet and gave me a bag of bagels, which I used instead of a bag I had in the freezer.

My total for two weeks was $49.25 and I actually got a break because of the three convenience meals. (Eating out, subs and mac. salad and pizzas.) We got to use up a lot of stuff that needed to be rotated out  of the pantry and had a lot of fun with new recipes, like pepperoni pizza bread in the breadmaker and veggie filled tortillas. (We’re going to try the pizza bread again sometime, but with more cheese. The oregano completely overpowered the cheese.)

Now, if you are going to try this challenge, you do need to have a stockpile to start with or you’ll end up being really frustrated and overwhelmed. You may also want to completely avoid the convenience stuff. The pizzas were only $2 each because I had coupons from last week’s Sunday paper, but the sub meal was $11 and the meal out was $7. That’s about a third of the money right there. If I wouldn’t have already had enough fruit and veggies to use, I wouldn’t have been able to afford to do the meal out.

I think I’m going to try the challenge again soon without convenience meals to see if I can really build the stockpile, at the same time. I’m not going to do it next week, though. I’m going to need to stock up on bread and meat, so I’ll be doing a $50 trip on Sunday.

Save more than $3,000 a year on your grocery bill & beat the grocer at pricing games

Shopping With Kids Can Make It Hard to Stay on a Budget. Photo: SXC

I started with Martins, where I got:
Dog food
4 bottles of ketchup
3 cans beans
2 boxes granola bars
2 containers sodium free boullion
3 milk
5 boxes poptarts
2 powerades
special low protein snacks for Mr. Rocky (our Standard Poodle)
toaster pastries
6 containers of juice
cheese sticks

I paid $39.55 after tax

Next, I hit ShopRite, where I got:
Vegetable oil
4 packs Stella Dora’s
bread
chicken
3 pounds apples
cotton swabs
Benadryl

I paid $22.04 after tax

Weekly Grocery Budget of $50

I went to Martins. The trip was supposed to happen tomorrow, but I was right there, so I decided to go today. Luckily, I hit the clearance mother lode and only spent $34.29. I got:

5 containers of juice (apple, V-8 Splash, etc.)

4 Gatorades

4 packages of cookies

Brownie mix

3 packs of gum

Granola bars

3 packages of natural fruit snacks

2 packages of cat treats

2 loaves of bread to freeze so I don’t end up rushing out to buy un-reduced bread again. (I didn’t even have time to use my bread machine to make a loaf, because my brother had meatballs hot and ready to eat and wanted a sandwich.)

A dozen donuts for tomorrow’s family breakfast (Very unthrifty. $5.99. I think next time I will bake a breakfast bread of some sort.)

So, I could have spent more time planning my trip and my menu to save even more, but this kind of trip shows how you can be somewhat thrifty even if you do everything wrong before you head to the store. Just look for bargains, compare weight and pricing info and take advantage of deals like the buy 6 items get $3 off instantly Gatorade/cookie deal I bought today.

Keep in mind that my list may seem a bit quirky, but I have a stockpile, I have a big basket of fresh fruit on the counter and my freezer is stuffed with meat.  Once you begin to build up a stockpile of your own, you can really spend less on your weekly trips.

Also, I will write more on this later, but you’ll notice I bought a lot of juice and sports drinks today. That is because the prices were good and my stockpile was low. I have enough juice to last at least a month now and will buy a lot of something else that is really on sale next week. When you shop this way, you’ll spend $10 or so for juice for a month all at once. It is probably more than you usually spend on juice in one grocery trip, but keep in mind that this is instead of paying $3.79 a jug each week because you need it whether it is on sale or not.