Saturday Savings - How to Feed a Habit Edition

Nick and I have a couple of "habits" or addictions if you'd rather I call them that. I'm a Diet Coke addict and Nick is a gum addict. Sometimes people wonder how we work those "habits" into our tiny grocery budget. Today I'll tell you how! First though, on to the deals from yesterday.

As you can see, I didn't buy a whole lot yesterday. Just a few essentials and a couple of stock up items. I spent a whopping $21.07 on all that over there!

Whole Milk - 2 gallons
Skim Milk - 1 gallon
Cheerios - 14oz box
VO5 Shampoo - 2 bottles
Eggs - 1 dozen
Split Chicken Breast - 3.75 pounds
Skippy Peanut Butter - 2 jars
Rice - 3 pounds
Bananas - 2.4 pounds
Flour Tortillas - 12 count
Baking Chocolate

The Deals: I was thrilled to find that milk at the Kansas Aldi is cheaper than milk at the Missouri Aldi - by 60 cents a gallon! By buying my milk at the Aldi in Kansas I had enough money to buy the bananas. The split chicken breast was 60% off. The Skippy was an incredible .98 a jar! I just told Nick last week how glad I was that he's decided the Aldi brand of PB is decent (we've not had good luck in the past with generic PB) because I almost never see PB lower than $1.50 a jar anymore. The Cheerios I snagged for .94 (75% off)! They were on sale for $1.49 and I had an internet coupon (probably printed from the Grocery Game website) for .55 off one. The baking chocolate I found in the clearance area marked down to .99.

Total cost before sales, coupons and tax: $40.35
Total cost after sales and coupons: $19.52 - Savings of just over 50%

Feeding the Habits: I thought it would be fun to show you how I saved big time on our "habits" in the last couple of weeks! First, the Diet Coke habit... A couple of weeks ago I saw that 12 packs of Diet Coke were going to be $3.33 a piece (3/$10) at Walgreen's. I had a $1 off my next purchase at Walgreen's coupon (had printed at the register on a previous trip) and I knew I had enough My Coke Rewards points to print a $1 off coupon on the web. I printed the coupon out and snagged a 12 pack of Diet Coke for $1.33! That's a habit I definetely can afford!

Now onto the gum... This past week in the coupon circular there was coupon for Stride Gum. If I bought 3 individual packages I could get $2 off. That's a decent deal even when paying full price for that gum (usually about $1.20 a pack I think). Later on Sunday I was flipping through the Walgreen's circular and spotted a store coupon for Stride gum! I could get up to three packages for only .79 each. When I combined those two coupons I paid just .12 a pack for Nick's gum. .12!

The lesson here? Watch for opportunites to combine both manufacturers and stores coupons - the savings can be fantastic!