When I was a pre-op (before surgery), I remember thinking - healthy food is SO expensive. We'll have to rearrange our budget to ever afford everything that is healthy. Then I justified that I'd be eating so much less, it wouldn't really make much of a dent.
Well, it's been my experience that neither are true! I still make enough servings of food (4 normal size portions on average) with each meal, if not more. That way, we have leftovers for lunch or we invite friends over to help us eat it! And it turns out, that it's NOT more expensive... as long as you're smart about shopping the ads, use coupons and stock up when you can. This has all changed for us in the last 3 months since I've been couponing and our budget is looking healthier and healthier each week - good thing, because the cost of heating this big old house with oil is NOT!
Tonight we had a great night grocery shopping. We have at least 2 weeks worth of food - FRESH food. We literally bought 90% of our items on the perimeters of the store. Other than a few boxes wheat thins, dog treats, a birthday card and a sugar free angel food cake - everything else was planned and fresh. Next week we might need to get a few supplemental items, but it will be minimal - $25 or less I'm sure. This is GREAT for our budget! Total I have enough to make 11 full recipes, plus all breakfasts and lunches for the next 2 weeks.
Here's the run down:
Spent: $175.71 / Would have been: 298.44 = Savings of 41%!!!
No generic items were purchased (not opposed, they just don't work with coupons) and we didn't shop any discount stores. We hit up Giant, Weis and Walgreens (b-day card and 2 boxes of crackers there).
To top it off, we treated ourselves to dinner out at Ruby Tuesday with a Buy One Get One Free dinner - saving $10 bucks AND we earned 70 cents off a gallon of gas at Giant - Ryan filled up on the way home and saved 11 bucks... can you believe we got gas for 2.45 a gallon? Booya!
I'm thinking I should do group shopping trips to teach people how to shop healthy and still save! Thoughts, feelings, ideas for me finding the time?
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