Saving Money
Posted by Maggie Fri, 22 Jun 2007 21:19:00 GMT
So my house is a mess. First of all I’ve been very tired since coming back from Jen’s and second I’ve been spending too much time researching money saving tips, specifically at the grocery store. So I thought I’d write down a few for you all and then go clean my house!
Hillbilly Housewife, has some excellent tips. One that I picked up and decided to try was to reconstitute instant non fat dry milk. Hannah goes through a ton of milk, plus milk for mac and cheese, on top of oatmeal, etc. so it’s a major expense for us. Well Henry’s has it for bulk, so we bought just a little bit to try. 2 days later and it’s gone. Hannah doesn’t seem to care and it’s not bad on oatmeal and I’m sure will be fine to cook with. I tried drinking it straight, and had a hard time with it, but if I can get just a small carton for my drinking needs and use the dry milk for everything else I bet we’ll be saving several dollars a week on milk alone!
The other tip I’m trying is a price book. This is a notebook or spreadsheet where you keep track of all the prices of your commonly purchased items. I’m using a spreadsheet that I found here. So far I’ve entered in all of this weeks fliers and found some interesting things. Right now you can get 85% ground beef at Henry’s for under $2/lb. and Ralph’s has strawberries on sale for $1/lb! About 3 out of the 4 stores I entered had both of these items on sale, but they varied greatly. One place at the ground beef (same fat content) for $3/lb and another had strawberries for $1.99/lb, Henry’s had them for $1.50/lb. Normally I would trust Henry’s to be the cheapest price for produce, but not the case this week (although they were cheaper for most of their other produce). I wish I didn’t just pre assemble a bunch of ground beef meals for the freezer, I didn’t get nearly as good a price. Next time I know to wait for the sale. It’ll be interesting to see how Costco compares.
I’m also trying not to waste so much food, especially on Hannah, I usually give her way too much, so I’m cutting her portions and she can have more if she wants it. I also know that this last trip to Henry’s I bought enough fruit for each of us to have 2 servings a day, I’ll make sure we each get in our 2 servings so as to get in lots of good food for us and not to waste that nice fruit. I’m afraid my last shopping trip wasn’t so planned out and I have some rotting fruit from over a week ago that I need to throw out.
I’ll also be going back to using my bread maker and saving a ton of money on bread. Guess I better get to that. We need enough space to pull out the bread maker before I can make bread.
