Melissas Bargains

It was a crazy Saturday, so I didn’t even make it to the grocery store. The beauty of having a stockpile is that sometimes I can go a couple of weeks at a time without going to the store. I think I went almost the entire month of December without going until the end of the month when I had to go to buy food for our New Year’s party.

Anyway…my usual “Savings Saturday” $40 weekly grocery budget post will be combined with my “Menu Planning Monday” post. Since I’m off on Monday, I will do my grocery shopping then.

I did make it to CVS on Saturday. I was running in and out with kids in tow after a birthday party, so I completely forgot about the Excedrin and St. Ives scrub. I will do that later this week. My total OOP for all of this was .29 and I will send off for the Pepsi rebate also.

Here’s the rest of my Savings Saturday post:

Mail call for the week:
*2 vouchers for a free manicure or pedicure from a Herbal Essence promotion (I got the shampoo for free, too!)
*Rebate for $3.99 from Excedrin (I got it for free and earned ECBs for buying it)
*$20 Gymboree gift card (from Gymboree Visa rewards)
*$10 Amazon gift card from a survey I took

Here are my updated savings totals:
Baby Emergency fund – last week’s total was $672, I earned $11.93 from Associated Content this week and got a $3.99 rebate check. Both will be applied to this fund for a total of $698.92 (Goal = $1000)
Gift savings – $132.42 (Goal = $1500)
Rolling entertainment fund – $0 (Goal = $500)

Here’s how much I have saved at individual stores: (I will update again tomorrow after my shopping trip)
Total Target savings – $109.93 to date (50% savings)
Total CVS savings – $187.77 (78% savings…this would probably be higher, but I do buy my stamps there to go toward my quarterly ECB earnings and you can’t use ECBs to pay for those!) Total Kroger savings – $21.34 (33% savings)
Total Randalls savings – $39.47 (100% savings) – I have paid for everything here with gift cards/coupons so far this year

**If you’re looking for spreadsheets to help you track your savings, there are some good ones here on the Mommy Snacks blog

I’ve had some people contact me to ask me what Associated Content is. Basically you can write an article about anything (it has to be a minimum of 400 words) and get paid for it. They pay a minimum of $3 per article (I have never gotten an offer that low. Most of my offers lately are $5-7) and they pay by Paypal pretty quickly after you have accepted their offer (it usually takes 7-10 business days for them to review the articles, though). When you submit the articles, you can submit them where the site has “exclusive” rights to your content or submit them with “non-exclusive” rights (which means you can submit the article in other places also). I have found that you don’t get any more money for submitting non-exclusive, so I do everything that way now. They also give a page view bonus every month based on the number of page views you have. If you decide this is something you want to do, you might want to try browsing the site just to get a feel for what people are writing about. Here’s a link to the FAQ section on the site. You can let me know if you have questions, too.