Taking Advantage of Your Local Sales

When trying to save money and live frugally, a great way to cut down your grocery bill is shopping the sales. If you're able to match up even a few coupons you can rack up significant savings. This week Shaw's,  one of my local stores, was having a sale, buy 10 items and get them all for .79 each. The great thing about this sale is you can mix and match, so I got 4 cans of soup, a package of butter, a can of stewed tomatoes, 2 bags of frozen ravioli and 2 bags of frozen gnocchi.

By buying all 10 items I got them for .79 each. However, to make the sale better I did the following:

Soup- $1/4

Ravioli- $1/2

Gnocchi- $1/2

So, all 10 items cost me $4.90 or .49 each

Shaw's also had coupons in the paper recently for their brand, Value Corner. There were coupons for pasta, well, I found the pasta was .69 this week, and the coupon was for .50/1. So I got 2 packs of pasta for .19 each. 

They also had a sale on Kellogg's cereal, buy 4 for $10, that sale in itself isn't all that great. But, you can make it pretty good. Whenever I see Kellogg's on sale I always check Kellogg's.com for coupons. I found that they had a .40/1 Raisin Bran coupon and a .50/1 Rice Krispies. Well, my husband likes Rice Krispies and I like Raisin Bran, so that was perfect, I printed off 2 of each. So I got 4 boxes of cereal for $6.40, but Shaw's made the deal even better. They were giving away a gallon of milk with every purchase of 4 Kellogg's cereals. So I got 4 boxes of cereal and a gallon of milk for $6.40 or $1.28 each. Now these were full sized family boxes, not the small ones, so this was a pretty decent deal. 

I know a lot of people think, I just don't have time for all of that. Well, 30 minutes on a Saturday afternoon saved me $43.83, which is $87.66/hour. I don't know anyone that makes that amount per hour. To show you that I really did save that much, and that I saved more then I spent, I've put the receipt summary below.