Shopping is done! And I was under budget!

It feels good to have food in the house again! And I am exhausted to say the least. I took the littlest duckling to the doctor, she unfortunately has an ear infection :( but afterwards we went picked middle duckling up from school and hit the stores.

I always go to Walmart first. 1. Because their prices are usually a little cheaper and 2. They price match! I spent the most money there, but got most of my groceries there! I don't buy meats there because I cannot help walking past the chicken and singing "chickity china the Chinese chicken, you eat a drum stick and your brain stops tickin'" lol I don't know why their meats bug me so much but they do. I also picked up a few things I forgot to put on the list and that always worries me because of going over budget. But today I actually stayed under budget ($170) by.... $10 dollars!! Whoop whoop! It always excites me when I pick up a few extras and still end up under budget!!!

We then hit up Pick n Save. I only bought stuff I had coupons for and they had on sale for less than what I can get at Walmart. I spent 48.06 at Pick n Save and 110.56 at Walmart! I saved 16.94 at Pick n Save.

As you will notice in the picture below, much of my stuff is generic brand, and I take no shame in that. I use to hate buying generic but I learned to doctor it up and deal with it. When you save .20 on 5 things, that's a dollar saved and if you keep doing that, it adds up.

So this is how I do it, my shopping trip prep that is. I go through all of my cupboard, my fridge, and my freezer the day before.  I take stock of what we have, get rid of anything expired, and take note of what is about to expire.  I then go through the grocery store ads and figure out what is on sale and make a shopping list from there.  On my list I write the items needed on the left side of the paper and then I make two columns on the right.  One is for MY estimate of what that product will cost and the other is for writing in the actual cost while at the store.  Yes, I am one of those ladies who is in the store with a binder, my list, and a pen in my hand, and I manage to do it with children with me ;)  But I enjoy it and it saves us money :)  By writing down what *I* think the price may be, I can see how close I am to our budget, and I ALWAYS try to estimate up because I would rather be under my budget than over! By writing out the actual cost, I can better plan for the next trip when I need the same product!


So here is my loot and for $160 I think I did fairly well, especially picking up quite a few extras that were not on the list.  It should feed my family of 5 for 10 days, and then some, but I have two boy ducklings in a growth spurt, so we'll see ;)