I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…

Adventures in Shopping

I’ve been out and about today, grocery shopping, christmas shopping, trying to shop for snowboots for my son and failing shopping… fun times. Actually, it was fun. Except for the boots. But I digress.

I decided this week to buy only exactly what perishable items we needed (dairy, fruits, and veggies mostly) and buy nothing else that actually contributed to meals and see how we do. We’ve got a lot of random food in our cupboards and pantry and I want to try and actually use stuff up instead of buying more stuff. Our meals might be rather creative this week, since I didn’t really take inventory before I decided to do this. I did buy meat this week, because there was a big sale at Kroger, but no starches or sides or any frozen vegetables. I really want to try and reduce or spending as much as possible right now while I am between contracting positions, and that’s what food in the pantry is for – to eat. I tend to be a hoarder.

I went to three places instead of two (to get meat at Kroger) and my experiment was a huge success. I spent $27.65 at Aldi, $12.83 at Walmart, and $6.41 at Kroger for a total of $46.89, well under my $90/week budget. I didn’t buy any impulse items, and I think I should go to Kroger on Saturdays more often. They had such yummy free samples! I had salad with raspberry dressing, feta cheese, and craisins (yum yum) and later some hot chocolate and christmas cookies. Way better than the typical Walmart samples. Yum.

I also went christmas shopping today, and in total I have spent about $175 of our $500 budget. And, I only have 5 more gifts left to buy! One of those gifts is a $25 gift card, and then the other 4 I am hoping to keep under $50 total to bring us to $250 spent of our $500 budget. I have been really good about looking for bargains and things people wouldn’t expect to get but I think they will really like. Yay! $250 is more than enough to cover gasoline for our trip to visit our relatives so we may have a few snowflakes left in January if everything goes according to plan. Yay!

My son has huge extra wide feet and the specialty store we have to buy all his shoes at was completely out of his size in boots. Still pondering what to do about that. Must think more about that tomorrow… he needs boots. We have mucho snow!