To start things off, I thought I’d show all of you what my money-saving strategies can accomplish!  Then in the days and weeks ahead, I’ll be showing you how to do this, too!

Our first stop was at Dillon’s.  They’re having an awesome Mega-Sale where if you buy 10 participating products, you automatically get $5 off your order!  I ended up buying 30 items, so that saved $15 right there!  To make the deal even better, I had coupons for every item I bought!  Unfortunately, the cashier missed some of them, which made me really mad, but I’m not going to get all worked up over that again.

Here is what we got:

In the future, I would like to be able to give you a complete rundown of the prices and the coupons I used, but that isn’t possible this week, mainly due to the cashier’s error.  I’ve pored over that receipt for hours and I still can’t make sense of it!

So for this time, I’ll just tell you that I spent $21.17 and saved $59.64.  That’s a savings of 77%!  I’ll also add that the Green Giant Vegetable Steamers were completely free, as was the toilet paper (and the Rotel tomatoes would have been if the cashier hadn’t skipped the coupon)!

Then I did another transaction at Dillon’s:

I got both pieces of meat marked down (more on how I buy my meat later!) and my coupon inserts for the week.  Chad had been following Ava around the store while I shopped and she came back with the Whoppers, so we got those since she had been so patient while I shopped.  My total for this was $14.68.

Our next stop was Aldi.  Since they don’t accept coupons there, I didn’t have any savings, but I can get some items quite a bit cheaper than anywhere else!

My total for Aldi was $22.64.

Then we hit Walmart and used coupons on nearly every item we bought.

I’ll give you a rundown for this one, since I can make sense of this receipt!

• Coffee Mate Creamer: 1.68 – 1.50 (Internet Printable) = 0.18
• Beech Nut Let’s Grow snack: 1.74 – 1.00 (MFQ) = 0.74
• 2 Earth’s Best Toddler snacks: 1.76 x 2 = 3.52 – $1/2 MFQ) = 2.52 or 1.26 each
• Clean and Clear Moisturizer: 5.17 – 2.00 (IPQ) = 3.17
• 4 Johnson’s Buddy Bar Soaps: 0.97 x 4 = 3.88 – 4 (two $2/2 IPQ’s) = -0.12 OVERAGE
• Marjoram: 3.92
• Green Bean Bowls: 1.66

My total was: 13.68 and my savings was $9.50

Then it was on to CVS.  I don’t have the receipt in front of me right now, but I know I spent approximately $23 and got $16 ECB’s (Extra Care Bucks) back.

The next day, I hit Walgreens to use up my Register Rewards.  I’ve decided not to try to roll them over every week and focus more on CVS right now (more on that later!).

• 4 Loreal Hip Eyeshadows, on sale BOGO: 6.99 x 4 = 27.96 – 13.98 (BOGO) – 8 (four $2/1 MFQ) = 5.98
• Orajel Training Toothpaste: 2.39
• Tri Vi Sol: 9.99 – 2.00 (MFQ) = 7.99

I used $15 in Register Rewards and took the remaining $3.86 off my gift card (more on that later, too…boy, I have so much to tell you guys!).  So I spent $3.86 and saved $40.58!  Not too shabby!

So our total for the week was $99.62.  That was just barely under budget, but over what I would normally want to spend.  But we really stocked up on snacks and veggies at Dillon’s and I had to make an initial investment at CVS in order to get ECB’s to use in the future weeks.  So in the end, it will all balance out.

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