My $40 weekly grocery budget

This was a big bargain shopping week! Between the bargain shopping and my daughter deciding she needs to wake up at insane hours (it was 3:30 am yesterday and 4:15 today), I’m beat! Here are yesterday’s trips:

Target: 1 bag of Iams dog food, 1 box of Bounce dryer sheets (P&G buy 2, get a $5 gift card promotion), 2 Venus Breeze razors (but 2, get a $5 gift card promotion), 2 1 GB USB drives (buy 2, get a $5 gift card promotion), 2 bags Flat Earth chips, 10 bags Milk Bone dog treats, 1 bag Puperoni dog treats, 15 boxes 12 ct Pop Tarts (Kellogg’s buy 5, get a $5 gift card promotion – did this three times on two different trips to two different stores), Disney Cars cell phone (impulse buy for my son’s Easter basket) – was $44.83 OOP (paid for $9.75 w/ gift cards), earned $20 in gift cards – none of this came out of my monthly grocery budget (the Pop Tarts were paid for using gift cards)

Randalls: 3 Bird’s Eye Voila frozen meals (used 3 $1 off coupons), 1 bag Safeway brand Southern Style frozen potatoes, 3 boxes Lean Pockets (used $1/3 catalina), 5 boxes Hot Pockets (used $1/3 catalina), 1 box Eggos, 3 boxes Kelloggs Frosted Mini Wheats (used .99 in store coupon and .70/1 Kelloggs coupon), 1 Freschetta pizza (used $1 coupon), 4 Tony’s pizzas, 2 cartons Dreyer’s ice cream, 1 box Pasta Roni, 10 cans Purina One dog food (used FREE coupons), 2 gallons milk, 2 cartons eggs, bananas, tomatoes, zucchini, carrots, strawberries, 1 pork loin, 1 beef roast (both the pork loin and beef roast were HUGE and will easily make two meals each for my family!)

Randalls is having a “Chill Out at Home” promotion where you spend $25 on selected frozen food items (the master list is here – it was posted originally on Slick Deals) and you get a $10 catalina back to use on your next purchase. I did three back to back transactions and “rolled” the $10 catalina into the next transaction and the next transaction (I only recommend this if you shop at crazy off hours where there is no one in the store, which is what I did). They also had a $10 off a $50 purchase in this week’s ad (it expired yesterday). If you have an Entertainment book and want to do this deal, you’re not out of luck – there is a $5/50 coupon in there. My total OOP was $48.54 for all of this and I earned 10 cents off each gallon of my next gas purchase, too! My total savings for all three trips combined was $113.95.

**I will get a $5 rebate back from the Bird’s Eye and my Madagascar 2 that I got at CVS a few weeks ago!

Kroger: 6 pouches StarKist tuna, 4 cans Vienna sausage – used 4 $1/1 StarKist coupons from Vocal Point, 1 BOGO StarKist tuna from Vocal Point, and 1 B2GO free coupon from last week’s inserts plus a $1.50 OYNP catalina from the fruit snacks deal a few weeks ago – I thought I was buying enough to cover the overage, but they entered the “free” tuna coupons at $1.39 instead of $1, so they paid me .51 and I also got a catalina for $1 OYNP for buying the tuna

CVS: 2 boxes Carnation Instant breakfast, 2 boxes SlimQuick, 2 bottles Vitamin 2, 2 bottles Act mouthwash, 2 Gillette Fusion razors – total OOP = $0 (rolled ECBs)

I haven’t been good about keeping up with my spreadsheet with my savings at individual stores, so I think I’m just going to start posting what I have saved for the week.

Here are my updated savings totals: (if you’re new to my blog and not familiar with my savings goals, click here)

Baby Emergency fund – $1000 (Goal = $1000) – added $129.17 cash rebate from Ebates, added $77.73 rebate check from credit card rewards – FULLY FUNDED 🙂
Gift savings – $235.68 (Goal = $1500) – added $98.02 from credit card rewards rebate check, added $5.24 from Theraflu/Walgreens rebates
Rolling entertainment fund – $103.26 (Goal = $500) – added $98.02 from credit card rewards rebate check, added $5.24 from Theraflu/Walgreens rebates

*Now that our baby emergency fund is funded, I will be splitting any money that comes in evenly between the gift savings and rolling entertainment fund until the rolling entertainment fund is fully funded.

Technically, I went over budget by $8.54 this week, but I only spent $1.99 of my $40 last week, and I keep that money in a fund for times when I need “extras” which definitely came in handy this week 🙂