Coupon Savings Week of 8/1 - My Second Week Back in the Game

This week can be easily summed up as cereal week for me.  I was able to get some great deals on cereal and replenish our supply that has diminished since March. I ended up with 19 boxes of cereal!  To some of you this may seem excessive, however my family goes through cereal rather quickly.  The boys usually have it for breakfast and a before bed snack (sometimes I join them).  Daphne loves trying out her new teeth by eating dry cereal.

This week again reminded me how much I enjoy couponing and being able to save my family money.  Our basement storage area is getting so full that we will need to add another set of shelves.  I realize how fortunate we are to need more space for food storage, there are families out there that can barely get anything to eat.  The food pantry at our church needed donations. It felt wonderful to be able to go into my basement and fill bags of food and personal items to donate.  I am trying to be very mindful of when the amount of an item is getting out of control and then donate some of what I have purchased.  Most of the items I donate were free or less than $1 so it is very little out of pocket for me but can make a huge difference for someone else.

This month I mostly donated meal kits, cereal, pasta, and deodorant.  When I first started couponing I was able to get at least 20 bars of deodorant in the first few weeks.  There is no way we would use all of that.  I also accumulated a nice stockpile of cereal and pasta.  All of the pasta was free and the cereal was fairly inexpensive.  After shopping this week the storage area is looking full and in a few weeks will be ready for another round of donations.  I am going to try to donate to the food pantry once a month.

Liam and Evan love to help me bring all my purchases down to the basement for storage.  Liam is old enough now that he can go down to the "store" and pick what he wants.  He always goes down and asks if anyone else wants something.

The only difficult part of having such a great supply of food is that I seem to be the only one that knows what is down there.  I think if everyone in the family knew what we had, we would be enjoying the fruits of my labor much more. Anyone have tips for how to spread the word?

I made it to Meijer, Walgreens, Kroger, CVS and Target this week.  Giant Eagle always throws me off since their ads run Thursday to Wednesday. It did make it nice since I didn't have to stop by there yesterday.  I can easily run to Giant Eagle during lunch next week to pick up the few things that I need.

This week I spent $126.93 on all of our home, grocery and personal care needs.  I saved $204.20. Summaries, spending breakdown by store, and what I purchased can by found below in my earlier posts.