Cindy’s Shopping Trip
Hello you guys! Did you miss me? Where have I been with my shopping trips? Well a lot has happened and been going on behind the scenes since I did a big shop and made my 20 freezer slow cooker meals.
Besides hurting my back and dealing with 2 months worth of awful sinus headaches, I also was preparing Thanksgiving dinner for 17 people, preparing for and taping a new Rachael Ray segment (don’t know the airdate yet), giving 2 (almost 3) workshops, getting through Black Friday and Cyber week madness on the site and more. Crazy stuff for us the last 6 weeks. As for my grocery shopping , I tried to just get by with the minimum amount of shopping, i.e, produce, half & half, eggs, milk and almond milk. Using the 20 freezer meals I made has proven time and time again over the last few weeks to be an absolute lifesaver for me. I’m so very happy I did them and will do another set after the holidays.
Over the last 6 weeks or so, I haven’t really kept track of how much I have spent on my groceries but I can tell you that as of, this past Saturday, I had $154.75 in my grocery envelope. My grocery envelope and my stockpile (pantry & freezer) are so important during times of craziness in our family. And, we all go through those times. You know them I’m sure. You have weeks and weeks of everything going smoothly. Plenty of time to cook, clean, prepare your shopping and shop. Then boom, out of no where, life gets in the way. No time to cook, you close your eyes to the pile of laundry sitting in the corner and you just run into the store and find yourself picking up a few items without even using a coupon. Gasp!
Yes, it happens to the best of us! Me included. But, having that budget and that stockpile helps to still keep me on track. I may have been spending a little more over the last few weeks but I stayed within my budget because I knew what my financial boundaries where. It’s very comforting to have that control even when things around you seem to be going out of control.
I started this week preparing to make some larger, upcoming purchases by taking advantage of the gift card offers that are going on right now at ShopRite. If you don’t have a ShopRite in your area, make sure to check your local circulars to see if they have offers like these gift card offers. They usually happen at many stores this time of year.
The way these type of offers work are that you buy participating gift cards and you receive cash back in the form of a store reward or a catalina offer (coupons that print at the register). Some people wonder how and why these are good deals when you still have to spend money on the gift cards in order to get the store rewards or catalinas. That is a very valid question. My answer is this…I approach these offers by having money set aside for these gift cards and buy them by using money from other categories in my budget. I only buy gift cards for stores I plan on or regularly buy from already or gift cards that I would be using as a gift.
In the case of this shopping trip, Panera gift cards are included. We eat at Panera at least once or twice a month. So, I purchased those gift cards with my restaurant budget money and earned $10 in free groceries (so far). See how cool that is.
With that said, here is an update on my grocery envelope. I’m starting with exactly how much I have in my envelope now since I wasn’t tracking my spending the last few weeks. Also, although I paid for the gift cards that money does not come out of my grocery budget but rather, in this case, it comes out of our restaurant budget. If I was, and I will be, buying gift cards as a gift, I would be taking that money out of my gift budget.
My plan is, this week and next, to start making some meat purchases using these catalinas as payment towards the meat purchases. Who says there are no coupons for meat 😉
Here are my breakdowns:
| Amount leftover from last transaction (includes rewards & rebates) | $154.75 |
| Amount added for new week (added every Sunday) | $100 |
| Total Amount available for shopping (includes rewards & rebates) | $254.75 |
| Cash used out of pocket | $0.41 |
| Rewards Used | $0 |
| Rewards & Rebates Earned | $10 |
| Amount left in envelope (including Rewards & Rebates | $264.34 |
Breakdown of my shopping trip:
Cindy Livesey is the force behind Living Rich With Coupons which provides it’s readers with all the resources they need to shop smart so they can get life’s necessities for a lot less. Her family has saved over $11,000 a year in groceries. And you can too!
Be sure to get her new book, Living Rich With Coupons which shows Cindy’s journey from unemployment and deep debt to digging her way out of debt using coupons. Plus tons of tried and true ways to save tons of money on your grocery bill so you too can be Living Rich with Coupons!
Be sure to follow Cindy on Instagram (livingrichwithcoupons), SnapChat (livinrichcoupon) or Facebook to check out all the behind the scenes happenings