The last couple months I have been trying very hard to watch our grocery budget. The way I see it, there are 2 very obvious ways to save money when shopping. 1. Buy what's on sale or 2. Use coupons. If you can do both at the same time, even better!
What's worked for me best is buying in bulk the meats when they are a really good price (ground beef, chicken, pork, etc). I then prep and freeze in the size that we tend to use them in.
Then I look at the sales fliers for the grocery stores in town and determine based on what meats I have in the freezer what meals I should make (For example: If I have 5 packages of ground beef and I see that spaghetti sauce is on sale, you can bet we will be having that for dinner. If I also know that I have a 5 pack of romaine lettuce that I don't want going bad, I will make salad as a side with said spaghetti dinner rather than buying say corn). I then scour my coupons and the web for any coupons for the items that happen to be on sale.
I then go shopping once a week for produce and other items such as milk that I don't or can't stock up on without it going bad. Of course I try to get fruits and veggies that are on sale (no buying a $5 pineapple for me - although we LOVE pineapple).
I've also recently found that looking through the local drugstore adds can be beneficial. For example, the other day I went to the CVS and got 2 bags of tortilla chips for $5, but I got to use a $1 off coupon I'd gotten my previous visit (and it printed another $1 off coupon for next time). On the same trip, I also got 4 packs of soda cans for $10 (if I had my way we wouldn't buy soda, but it helps hubby stay awake to get work done at strange hours).
I went to the Walgreens and got a 4lb bag of sugar for $.99 (I used their coupon in the sales flier plus a manufacturers coupon).
I realize that store hopping may not be worth it to some, and I will be honest... till recently it wasn't to me either. I didn't want to drag my kids around everywhere and hear the whining as we hit the 3rd or even 4th store that day. I live closer to things now and I've learned to break up the trips across multiple days (and sometimes I even go after they are in bed). My kids are a bit older now too so that helps.
I have recently encountered a problem though. One of my biggest sources for coupons is printing them online. For some reason, my computer / printer will randomly decide not to print them. This is particularly bad because the manufacturers limit how many you can print of any given coupon. I've hit my limits trying to print just 1 coupon (the limits are usually at least 2 sometimes up to 4 or 5). Today I even decided to print a coupon I didn't want first to see if it worked at all. It printed just fine, so I then went back and tried to print the ones I really wanted and guess what.... it didn't print them (and of course I've now reached my printing limit - not that I've printed ONE)! Ugghh!
Good news... I've still been able to stay on budget even without the coupons I tried to print.
