Yet another week in the land of saving!

With the husbeast and I both off, we did our shopping today (I also have 2 prenatal appointments tomorrow and it's almost impossible to schedule much of anything else around that). This week was not a good week for couponing, oh sure I was able to clip a lot of coupons from my 2 Sunday papers, but the coupons I have just didn't match any of the sales this week. This week was also our meat and dairy week so we had to stock up on some things that there aren't many coupons for. We went to 3 stores today: Aldi, Kroger and Publix. Again, it's hard to know exactly how much we saved at Aldi today as everything we purchased from there was full price. But remember, full price at Aldi is cheap, cheap CHEAP! We set a new record today, we did all of our weekly shopping in 1 hour. Oh yeah!

So here are the goods broken down store by store:




Aldi

1 dozen eggs

1 gallon of milk

1 3 lb. bag of granny smith apples

2 3 lb. tubes of ground beef

1 3 lb. package of polish sausage

1 8 ct. pack of hotdog buns

1 16 ct. package of presliced cheese

1 24 oz. jar of salsa

1 15 oz. jar of cheese dip

2 cans of chili

1 8 ct. package of AAA batteries

1 15 oz. bag of plain tortilla chips

1 11 oz. bag of ranch tortilla chips


GRAND TOTAL (tax included): $34.97
TOTAL SAVINGS: Who the heck knows, but it's got to be at least 15%


Kroger

2 1 lb. packages of smoked sausage (B1G1)

GRAND TOTAL (tax included): $4.06
TOTAL SAVINGS: $4.00


Publix

2 all purpose Windex cleaners (2/$5 + 2 $1/1 coupons)

4 16 oz. jars of Ragu alfredo sauce (B1G1)

2 1 lb. boxes assorted Mueller's pasta (B1G1)

4 assorted Taco Bell dinner kits (B1G1)

GRAND TOTAL (tax included): $14.67
TOTAL SAVINGS: $14.88


GRAND TOTAL OVERALL: $53.07
TOTAL SAVINGS (Kroger & Publix only): $18.88

Not too bad, less than $60 for everything we got and we got a fair amount of meat. Our total between Kroger and Publix alone was $18.73, so we saved more than we spent at those 2 stores alone! My mission is to not have to buy anything but milk and eggs when I go on maternity leave. I do not get paid maternity leave where I work, so we will be living on my husbands paycheck alone which would be more stressful if we weren't faced with having to do weekly grocery shopping and spending over $100 on average (eek!). Thankfully those days are long gone, sure there will be weeks when we will spend more than others, but since out stockpile is growing we don't have to buy all the little things every single week anymore. I will try to post pics of our little stockpile sometime this week just to show what we have accomplished so far.

So there to have it, another week in the land of frugal living. Another idea that we will be trying soon (my family is trying it at their house with great success) is cloth napkins. You can buy a whole bunch of bandanas for super cheap and apparently they make GREAT cloth napkins. What a fantastic way to save on paper products! And if you're concerned about the extras cost of washing all the cloth napkins, it's really not when you factor in the amazing powdered laundry soap recipe that my family is using with GREAT results (http://savvybrown.com/home/homemade-powder-laundry-detergent-recipe/ for the recipe). They are actually saving much more than they were spending on paper towels and paper napkins (they have a house full with 8 people living there).

How did you do this week? Any tips on how to live more frugally? Please share!