Frugal Friday ~ August 10, 2018

It's Friday once again and time for another frugal blog post. 
We stayed home several days this week and worked on cleaning, sewing, and reselling. 
Monday was the day the washer was fixed, so we ended up washing four loads and folding and putting those away. 

Recent Packages Waiting on the Mailman

We continue to make sales online and oftentimes we use second hand packaging materials. We always reuse the ones we get in the mail. 

I'm still decluttering around here. Some of the silliest things were kept for some unknown reason. 
Today I put into the donation pile two pieces of glass that looked like tiny candle holders. I suspect my daughter kept them when she was little. She never wanted to get rid of anything back then, but today is another story. Thank goodness.  :)

Do you ever leave your grocery list at home? When I've done that it's usually because I ended up in town for some other reason and wanting to save on fuel, I go to the grocery store, but without my list since I hadn't planned to go there.
I've been using Google Docs for a while now, but never thought to keep my grocery list on there. I can access Google Docs from my phone. Since I always have my phone with me for sub jobs, I will now always have my grocery list with me.  

Could it be a possibility that price books may become obsolete with the new grocery store pick up websites? These stores have their products listed, the different sizes and the prices as well. 
This week I compared groceries at two websites, Walmart and Food City. 
Comparing prices has never been easier than it is now. We could be shopping in a store and wonder if a price on one item is a better value somewhere else and a quick view on your smartphone will answer that question. 
I've been having fun this week comparing prices between Walmart and Food City. As always, no one store has the best price on everything. 
If you're interested, this link to Walmart will give you $10 off of your first pick up order. 

My daughter did her usual Thursday thrift store shopping and stopped in at Ingle's to find these meat markdowns:

Ground beef, actually marked down twice. Final price was $5.99 each for over three pounds in each package works out to $1.83 per pound.

Sweet Italian Sausage for $1.99 each, which is a great price. 

And lastly, two cheddar style burgers for $1.99.

That is all the news to report this week. I hope you have had a wonderful, frugal week. I would love to hear all about it in the comments section. 
Belinda ~ Living within our Means ~

Saving on Groceries Series ~ Food Lion Cha-Ching Brand

Food Lion rebranded their store brand items in 2015 with the new Cha-Ching label. They advertise themselves as the place where Thrift is Cool. 
Each product has a 100% money back guarantee and the prices on those items has always been really good. 

The other day I found a new price for me on a staple item I use to make Chicken Pot Pie. 
Campbell's brand of cream of potato soup is $1.48 and usually substitute the Great Value brand of that, which costs 75¢. 
The other day I realized that Food Lion's Cha-Ching brand of Cream of Chicken soup is only 48¢. 
If you buy this product during one of Food Lion's savings promotions, you can actually receive a  25¢ coupon on your NEXT shopping trip for each store brand item you purchase as long as you buy at least four items. 
This drops the price of the soup to 23¢. Cha-Ching! 
Here are the official rules to the promotion.  
Now I much prefer the cream of potato soup that I normally use, but I am more than willing to switch from cream of potato to cream of chicken for the savings this will bring me.
The point of this post is to be willing to shop around and see if you can find the items you normally buy at even cheaper prices in order to save the most money. 
Belinda ~ Living within our Means ~

Saving on Groceries Series ~ April Grocery Shopping Post

On Monday I did the bulk of our grocery shopping for the month. I went to a total of seven stores in order to save the most money. 
Now I enjoy grocery shopping, but I know that not everyone enjoys it and certainly wouldn't go to seven stores to save money, so they would need to find other strategies to save the most money on their grocery bills. 
For me grocery shopping is enjoyable, so this is fun for me. I just make sure to go at times when the store is not as crowded because it's easier for me to concentrate. 
Amounts I spent yesterday include:
Flowers Bakery $7.81 Food City $43.86 Cooke's $28.21 Publix $19.59 Food Lion $26.00 Fresh N Low $15.94 Fresh N Low $2.87 Walmart $49.72 Total: $194.00
I won't list all the items I bought yesterday, but did want to give some highlights. Also some highlights that we bought over the weekend. ---------------------------------------------------------- Food City had 32 ounce bags of cheddar cheese for $5.00 on Friday only with a limit of two, so we made sure to get this great deal.  ---------------------------------------------------------- We bought some ground chuck on yellow mark down sticker. 

We bought some sliced deli ham on markdown...

----------------------------------------------------------

Surprisingly, I found cream cheese at Food City for 75¢. This is a fabulous price, so I picked up ten of these. 

They also had our favorite breakfast sausage, Swaggerty's, on sale for $2.49, so I picked up four of those for the freezer. 
---------------------------------------------------------
Food Lion had two large pepperoni pizzas on yellow reduced sticker for $5.59 each. I picked up both of those and will serve them for dinner two nights this month. 

Food Lion has Keebler Club Crackers on sale this week priced at 2 for $4.19. I used 850 of my Kellogg's Family Rewards points to print 2 - $1.00 off coupons, so I was able to get 2 boxes for $2.19 or $1.10 each, which is a fantastic price. 
----------------------------------------------------------

One item I picked up at Cooke's included cottage cheese, which had been marked down to $1.99, but there were coupons attached for 50¢ off, so I picked up four of those for $1.49 each. 

Also, there was a package of clementines on the reduced priced produce rack, but one of them was ready for the trash bin. 

So, I took them to customer service and asked if they would reduce the price further. Guess what? The manager just let me have them for free. I thought that was pretty neat. 

Those are the highlights from our grocery shopping this week. It's great to have our home stocked up for the time being. 

Belinda ~ Living within our Means ~