I have made attempts at the extreme couponing I really have....but I just haven't been able to stay dedicated to it quite enough for it to fully help out our family budget. I am committing as of now to get my family fed on a budget of $40 a week by time I am 35 years old. This gives me 2 years to get us living off $40 a week for our food needs. This is not going to include our take out which we do on Saturday nights. As of lately all we do on Saturdays is one magical $5.55 pizza from Little Casears and then Gabby usually gets Wendys or McDonalds nugget meal since she doesn't do pizza.
What this could mean though is opportunity for nicer take out meals for our family on Saturday nights. What I don't want to do though is fill our cupboards with junk. Although I find there is a time and place for junk (cause admit it some of it is DANG tasty!) I want our family to eat healthier and not pump it up with too much junk.
Now I shared about a month ago my 4 week menu plan and although I still plan on using that as a rough template I also am going to need to learn to shop the sales and then create meals from those items more often.
I will be doing my first shopping trip tomorrow based on this new mission and I will include my Aldis shop from last night too since that counts as part of this new budget experiment.
I shop bi-weekly for the most part for two reasons, 1)I do not enjoy shopping and 2)I get paid bi-weekly so it just works. I will plan on watching ads and grabbing up stuff though that I really want if it is on sale on a non-shopping week.
I will post our total spent out in August as a starting off point so that way we can compare how I do in upcoming months. I am excited for this challenge and for any extra money it may provide my family to spend on more fun things ;)
If anyone wants to join in I would love to see you post about this and share with me hints and tips!
I also want to share a couple links with you all on who inspired me to try this out...first off is Sarah from Sarah's Deals, she is also from West Michigan like me :) YAY! I am also inspired by bulk freezer cooking that is featured on many sites and I particularly like the posts about it on Money Saving Mom. Again if you have any favorite bulk meals you like to pop into the freezer for later please share!
Ok so yesterday at Aldis I purchased the following
1pkg turkey bacon
1 hummus
2 large cans baked beans
bag of onions
orange ice cream bars
lime sherbet
tub of margarine
1 box husbands fave cookies
1 gallon milk
1 pkg gum
TOTAL $21.19
You should check out www.e-mealz.com, pretty much exactly what you're going for, but they do all the footwork of finding the deals and planning menus to use with those deals. It recommended by Dave Ramsey who leads Financial Peace university, you should really look into it. I got a 3 month membership to sneaks through Groupon and I'm digging it! Andrea
ReplyDeleteGood luck! Food is sooo expensive (I think it's much more so up here than down there), we are lucky to get away with spending less than 150$ every WEEK, so 40$ a week would be impossible (we also don't have coupons like you guys do, not to the 'extreme' anyway, haha), but I'm looking forward to seeing how you do, because from the sounds of it, you guys eat a lot like we do (semi-healthy, lol) Good luck!
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