Living on a Budget: Groceries $40 for 4

Another great week doing Groceries $40 for 4. It was another busy week but I managed to break away this past Saturday morning to go to the Sav Mor Box Sale with the family. If you haven’t been before and you live in the Greenville area it is worth the time to stock up on food items. It felt great saving some of the grocery shopping cash this week while stocking up on some items for our pantry. Below are my grocery shopping adventures for the week!

We bought 107 items and paid $16.00 total which means we spent less than $0.15 per item!!!  You can often get some excellent deals at Sav Mor’s Box Sale.  I was hoping to stock up on snack items for our family since I will be traveling a little and I wanted to make sure there were plenty of easy snacks to take as well as  meals that could be made quickly for our family.  Our dining table was full once we unpacked the boxes!  We even got some Organic / Whole Wheat food items for the family.  We purchased two boxes at $7.00 each and the case of chips was $2.00 giving us our total of $16.00.

Sav-Mor Groceries from the Saturday Sidewalk Box Sale:

• 8 Bags – 18 oz Laura Lynn Restaurant Style Tortilla Chips (they sold these for $2.00 per case, we got 1 case)
• 4 – 4 packs Vermont Organic Strawberry Banana Applesauce
• 1 – 25 count Milkshake Straws
• 1 – 4 oz Kettle Baked Potato Chips – BBQ Flavor
• 2 – 26.5 oz Hunts Pasta Sauce
• 1 – 14.5 oz Sliced Potatoes
• 1 – 64 oz Laura Lynn Fruit Punch Juice
• 1 – 3.5 oz Quaker Vanilla Creme Brulee Rice Snacks (Whole Wheat)
• 2 – Annies Organic Alfredo Shells & Cheddar
• 1 – 4 pack Gerber Yogurt Blends
• 2 – Roasted Chicken Gravy Packs
• 1 – Roasted Turkey Gravy Pack
• 6 – Simply Organic Alfredo Packs
• 2 – Molly McButter Fat Free Natural Sprinkles
• 2 – Laura Lynn Woven Wheats
• 6 – Hamburger Helper Lasagna
• 6 – Brach’s Candy Hearts
• 1 – Pasta Roni Chicken
• 2 – Mrs. Fields Rainbow Chocolate Chip Packages
• 2 – Mrs. Fields Snickerdoodle Packages
• 1 – 15.4 oz General Mills Total Cinnamon Crunch
• 3 – 15.25 oz General Mills Total Blueberry Pomegranate
• 1 – 16 pack Betty Crocker Fruit Shapes, Gushers, Rollups, By the Foot, Fruit Stickerz
• 3 – Betty Crocker Fruit Rollups
• 4 – Betty Crocker Fruit Stackerz
• 1 – 10.5 oz Kraft Marshmallows (4 flavors)
• 1 – 8 pack Chi-Chi’s Flour Tortilla’s
• 8 – Land O’ Lakes Caramel Hot Chocolate Packs
• 1 – 9 oz Annie’s Natural Organic Dijon Mustard
• 2 – 10 packs Propel Raspberry Lemonade
• 13 – 4 packs Starkist Chunk Light Tuna (the sticker on the packages read $4.98 each and they didn’t expire until 2012, so that is a huge savings – it would normally cost us $64.74 to buy them)
• 4 – 6 packs Quakers Simple Harvest Dark Chocolate Chunk (the sticker on the packages read $3.28 each – it would normally cost us $13.12 to buy them)
• 5 – 6 packs Quakers Simple Harvest Trail Mix (the sticker on the packages read $3.28 each – it would normally cost us $16.40 to buy them)
• 1 – Carr’s Whole Wheat Crackers
• 1 – 8 pack Ocean Spray Oatmeal with Cranberries
• 2 – Nutritious Living Hi-Lo with Strawberries
• 3 – 14 oz Captain Crunch Peanut Butter Crunch
• 1 – 16 oz Captain Crunch

Sav Mor has been doing their Box Sale for several years now.  They will occasionally offer additional discounts as well.  For example, last Saturday you could get a case of Tortilla Chips for $2.00 which meant you were getting the chips for 25 cents per bag.   There is more information I want to share with you about how the sale works so  I will be going into more details about the Sav-Mor Sidewalk Box Sale in a later post.

Groceries from CVS:

• $2.85 at CVS for Kellogg’s Fruit Loops ($1.16 for the box), Kellogg’s, Rice Krispies ($1.16 for the box), and CVS Honey Wheat Pretzel Twists (of clearance for $0.49 cents)

Groceries from Bi-Lo (I didn’t have a chance to take a picture this week, but wanted to include our milk purchase):

• $6.04 at Bi-Lo for 2 gallons of Milk ($2.99 each)

I am excited to see us doing better on our Groceries $40 for 4 budget.  This week we spent $24.89 on groceries so it was a pretty good week regarding saving extra grocery cash.  We did better this week because I a little extra time and went to the Sidewalk Box Sale at Sav-Mor.  I was able to stock up on a few extra items this week for the pantry.  I am still trying to work out all the details of how to make the budget most effective for our family and I think we need some weeks have been easier than others.  It was nice to share some of the items we picked up this week with some friends too!  Love being able to get a great deal and share with others.  We’ll see how next week goes, it should be interesting because my husband is in charge next week of the $40 grocery budget since I will be traveling!

It is my goal to give you regular updates on this budget section so you can celebrate the good weeks with me and thump me on the bad weeks!  As always you are welcomed to join the journey with me.  I would love to hear your story and how you are doing too.  The purpose of our family doing this it to watch our grocery spending while allowing us to feed our family, enjoy life, share with others, and yet stay on track with our budget.

Living on a Budget is a series of ways our family uses a budget to help keep us accountable with our finances.  Life doesn’t always go as planned.  We have used some of the ideas I will be sharing for years while others are ones we are just starting to implement as we continue finding ways to be creative and have fun with what we have been given.  Having a plan in place allows us the freedom to be smart with what we have been given, get more creative when it is a tight (week, month, year or a season) and when necessary live a much more simplified life.  A budget helps us stay on track so we have more opportunities to enjoy the many blessings we have been given as well as share what we have with others.  There is so much more to life than having all the stuff.  We may not have the newest or greatest items in our house, we drive used cars, and wear hand-me-down clothing…..however, if our family is taken care of and have love for each other and others we have more than all the riches in the world.