Saturday Savings #2

Eat out of your home.  This includes home cooking all meals. Also, eat up any food you may have stored.

I'm a store-er.  Not a hoarder.  I keep emergency easy make meals such as hamburger helper, pasta and sauce and frozen meatloaf/meatballs.  They're easy to store and don't perish quickly (precooked food in a deep freeze can last a year!).  They're go to meals when I run out of time, or have doctor's appointments and we don't want to eat out.  Being gluten-free makes it harder to eat out at restaurants, especially if I try to keep it inexpensive.

Start with consuming any food you have in your freezer and pantry.  I always keep a well stocked pantry for emergency and a lot of my cooking comes from there.  I usually just supplement with produce.

By doing this you'll use food you already owned, you can become more creative in the kitchen and you'll save money and time.  Restaurant meals are at about 3 times more expensive than the same meal home cooked.  Although I find pasta dishes are maked up much more than that.  Olive Garden sells their marinara sauce and pasta for $7.95 (well the last time I was there they did).  A pound of pasta is $1 and a jar of Ragu can be found for $1.66 (neither of these is sale prices) and that can feed 4 people!

When we get a medical bill we didn't foresee or we just want to put some money in savings we do a pantry challenge and eat as much out of our freezers and pantry  before going shopping.

The best part of pantry challenges is the thrill of replacing it at the cheapest price possible.

Saying Farewell to Wal-Mart

One week ago, I stopped in at Wal-Mart with Bear, to pick up two things, while on our way to refilling his prescription.

It took me about 45 minutes to find a garbage can because they're in the process of reorganizing the store and all the workers are too busy to be bothered by a customer.

When I asked for help I was either completely ignored, given a rude "I have no idea", "Ask someone else" or given directions to the frozen food area.  I'm pretty sure no store would put their garbage cans in the frozen food section, and they weren't there.

After a long and arduous search, I found them, in a random aisle with the Tupperware.  There was a whole stack of them and they said they were marked down to $6.  There was no barcode on the price tag, so I read the whole title and it matched up.  When I got to the cashier with my garbage can and swiss chees,; it rang up $14.24.  I told the cashier that was incorrect and her answer was "It has to be that.".  No asking for someone to check it, no listening to what I was saying.  I told her to cancel my order, removed Bear from the cart, and for emphasis, walked away.

Of course I then struggled with guilt that some poor undeserving soul had to put my cart and groceries away, but it needed to be done.  This was not the first time I have been disappointed in their customer service. They're return policy is awful, and I've always felt like I'm disturbing them by being a customer.  Half the time the stores are dirty and disorganized, their pricing is disorganized, and they, as of late have a horrible inventory.

Wal-Mart and I have broken up. 

The next day I proceeded to buy my trash can from Target.  I know, still an evil conglomerate, however I have never heard the awful horror stories about Target as I have from Wal-Mart.

So, yesterday Hubs, Bear, and I went to our local grocery store/Ace Hardware (they're all in one now) and did our shopping.  We did some investigating and found we can refill our 5 gallon water jugs for just $0.31/gal, 4 cents cheaper than Wal-Mart.

So I've decided to only buy from our two local grocery stores (they're both small chains, but one is still family owned).  I'm still struggling with where to buy my other necessities, so I'm going to stick with Target and try to minimize those purchases.