May Coupon Savings

I must say I'm pretty excited this morning. I finished entering my grocery store receipts for the month of May, breaking them down in order to determine how much I am saving on our monthly grocery bill by shopping sale items, by using store and manufacturer coupons, and by stacking these savings together for maximum benefit. We shaved a whopping 38% off of our bill last month or a total of about $400. Now I am sure there are others who are way more successful, but for just starting off with a concentrated effort to produce savings, I'm feeling pretty good about it.

Coupon savings for May were about $20 greater than they were for April. Considering that I had probably only saved about $50 at best in prior months, the most important factors would have to be purchasing when items are on sale not when you need them and by stacking coupons with advertised savings. My previous post talked about the strategies I have learned, and they do work! In order to get started by purchasing more on-sale items than items I would have typically needed for a week's menu, I employed a tactic from the Hillbilly Housewife by using her $45 per week Menu Planner for one week to cut down on meal expenses a bit while starting to stock up on sale items. Within a week or two of filling pantry shelves with sale items, I didn't find this necessary and could go back to my normal shopping habits.

To be honest, we haven't been tracking our monthly grocery expenses, and the total spent even with coupon savings struck me as high. A little background information might be helpful to determine what we actually purchase during a month. We eat mainly unprocessed foods, do have game such as venison and elk in our freezer, eat most of our meals at home including our four children, but I wouldn't consider our diet limited in any way. A typical receipt at the grocery store might include household cleaners, health and first aid, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics - for four females which can add up fast - miscellaneous office supplies, and the like. I've considering purchasing those items on a separate receipt just so I can see what our true grocery costs are. Our after savings receipts total $670 which works out to about $165 per week including our other non-grocery items. It will definitely be interesting to track just food purchases and see where we come out at. I would love to connect with other similar families and compare grocery costs. I would imagine there is more I could learn about reducing our grocery expenses even further.

Enough for today. I hope you've started the couponing habit. You can follow links here, here, and here to my original posts explaining how I got started. In the meantime...time to head downstairs and start my shopping list from the grocery ad flyers that just arrived yesterday. Happy clipping!