Weekly Grocery Savings

So after I started couponing last year, I became a Publix girl. I used to do 90% of my grocery shopping at Wal-mart because I "thought" it was cheaper. I have found that I was wrong in that aspect.

Now, 90% of my shopping comes from Publix, 5% from Wal-mart, and 5% divided up btween Food Lion, Piggly Wiggly and Bi-lo.

This week is a Piggly Wiggly week. I did no shopping at Publix this week. Why? Because Piggly Wiggly had ground beef at $1.29 a pound. I watch all the circulars and we stock up on meat sales. Bi-lo is a good place to get chicken breasts for 99 cents a pound. Food lion is great for sales on ground beef as well as mark downs on meat. I like to go to Food lion in the morning after they have marked down meat, and stock up on steaks, pork chops and the like. Then I go home and immediately freeze them.

We love our freezer and we like to keep it stocked. This gives me the opportunity to plan out what we are going to have as well as change my mind at the spur of the moment.

So this week, we shopped completely at The Pig. We bought roughly 50lbs of ground beef, and Joe and I have cooked, seasoned, strained, rinsed and froze all of them. Yes, it sounds like a lot of work. Actually, it took him and I about an hour to do the 28lbs he bought this evening. That's all. Two hours worth of work and we now have 50 something pounds to be able to grab and use at a moment's notice. The last time we stocked up was Memorial Day and we ran out just a couple of weeks before the end of the year. Not too bad.

Tonight, I was able to grab a pound, quickly thaw, throw some ingredients together and we had a wonderful Shepherd's Pie for dinner. Joe will also have some for lunch tomorrow. We now have plenty for quick meals of Spaghetti, Chilli, etc...

Here are our grocery savings so far:

Spent: $68.37
Saved: $78.26 (53% Savings)
Paper & coupon purchases to date: $16.14 (6 papers and 8 coupons in the last 2 weeks)

Total OOP: $84.51

Yearly Savings: 48%