I haven’t been grocery shopping, yet, but I wanted to say a huge “thanks!!!” for introducing me to swagbucks. I’ve been at it for about a month and I also have $10 in Amazon gift cards. At $10/mo, I’ll be able to put away a bunch for Christmas and birthdays, especially w/ all the Amazon deals I’ve seen on here. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! :)

This is Mina. The kiddos and I have been enjoying the Olympics this past week, too, particularly the men's figure skating. Haven't posted or even been online or spent much time shopping for the past couple of months. In the meantime, my buying habits have changed and turned sharply to be more like the way I used to shop, but keeping a few elements from last year's 'experiment'. So, this is sort of a breakdown on my shopping since the beginning of the year.

Although we enjoyed many of the products that we bought last year, most of them have been cut from our Keep in Stock List and moved to the Junk Food We Don't Need List, which means that I might buy a couple of the item during a year if the OOP is super low. A sample of the items that made that list were Pop Tarts (for obvious reasons), which they pigged out on when I bought them last year because those were things that I previously refused to buy, but they eventually stopped wanting once the 'specialness' wore off; V-8 Splash, which I HAD felt good about until I realized that it isn't “juice”, but sugar water with 10% juice, which means it would have to be under 20 cents to be cost worthy; and Hormel Always Tender pork loins, because the 18 oz pkg. contains 30% injected 'broth' PLUS and undisclosed # of ounces of “sauce”, which means the OOP would need to be close to $1.25/pkg. to be attractive enough to buy. We also have a Junk Food We Want On Hand List. Those are things that I will keep stocked. The primary ingredient in those items is chocolate.

There were also items that we have discovered the past year and really like: Ocean Spray juices, Juicy Juice, Krusteaz pancake mixes, some SteamFresh veggie combos, Swiss Miss Dark Chocolate Sensation, Bertolli dinners (if we add more pasta and veggies), whole wheat egg noodles, College Inn Broth, Bear Naked granola/trail mix, GoodLife cat food, Scrubbing Bubbles, and Finish/Electrosol. To be sure, there are many others, and I'm certain that we will continue to try new things.

The main reasons for the reversion are that we enjoy the taste of foods we cook from scratch much more. There is very little difference in prep time. We enjoy the process of cooking together. We like knowing what's in our food; and the kiddos, as a group, have become very conscious of what they eat. It is also because I believe that healthy eating can have large hidden savings over a lifetime. We still eat some junky stuff, but are making sure to have a full quota of whole grains and fresh produce every day.

The previous ten months of sales/coupon shopping has led me to believe that I can wind up spending about the same amount either way. Since the beginning of the year, I've been spending between $15 and $40 every other week to purchase between 50 and 150 lbs of produce when I go to the Farmers Market. Now that we're back to having a good selection at home, it will drop to $10-$20 every other week. It takes awhile for even my size family to go through 50 lbs of onions. ;-)

My grocery/drugstore expenditures for the past two months have ranged between $10-$110/wk., with the $110 occurring last week when I spent $60 at Wag's, mainly for GoodNites, ibuprofen, and candy bars, even though I didn't have any coupons. The same week I spent $40 at the Farmers Market for 40 lbs of delicious pears and a trunk STUFFED full of collards. The workers loaded the produce for me, and I was shocked when I opened the trunk for them to put in the pears. There was no room! There were waaaay more collards in there than what I had expected.

This week I made 2 trips to Publix, one for last week's sale items, and one for this week's. It's funny that both times I spent $10.75. The first trip was for tea, Country Crock, brown rice, cauliflower, and broccoli. I saved $25.56. The second trip was for pasta, rice, and Chiquita smoothies. Savings were $22.50.

My trip to Kroger ran $7.86 for 2 gallons milk and 5 loaves of greatly marked down whole grain and seed bread from the bakery. Savings on the bread was $17.70. I only consider the milk savings to be 30 cents total because that was the price difference from Aldi.

My only purchase at Walgreen's was clearance Valentine candy, which totaled $3.00 and was completely paid for with the candy RR's from last week, which had been paid for with GoodNite RR. You can either call that a savings of $7.08 or not, since what I did was blow a $3 RR on an indulgence.

Total spent this week: $29.36 (Targeted average is $60wk.)
Total saved: $73.14

Percent saved was around 71%, which is less than the 75% that I aimed for through last year. On the other hand, my weekly average spending has been running 30% less than last year, and the time I spend shopping and preparing to shop is about 1/5 what it was last year. One negative about the change is that since I'm in stores less frequently I see fewer coupons, because they disappear quickly around here. I hope everyone had a satisfyingly successful week with their shopping.