Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Couponing for Thanksgiving: Part 2

As you know.....my family is on a strict budget in order to keep us as stable as possible in this very unstable economy.  So my plan was to use coupons for Thanksgiving.  I gotta say....it worked better than I thought it would!  So here's how it went:

Originally I was only hosting a small group of people on Thanksgiving....but that changed rather quickly!  Now I am hosting for my husband's entire family!  EEEEK!  Along with getting enough food to feed the masses, I still had to shop for my own household (two weeks worth of shopping to be exact!).

My local store runs a special once a month: $10 off of $50 or more (this sales excludes milk and turkeys, don't know why...but it does!)  Now....since you can only get the $10 off once....I had to make two trips that day.  I stratigically bought items that would result in me getting catalina coupons good for my next trip (which would be about 20 minutes later)!  I would rather not get into details about everything I bought, but to sum it up, my first trip was $70.47 before coupons....after coupons, I only paid $19.78!  A 72% savings!

Now, for my second trip, I had to get the turkey.  I needed to get the biggest bird they had to feed everyone and have leftovers for me!  If you remember, I could not use the turkey with the $10 off deal, which only meant I had to get $50 worth of groceries plus the turkey.  My total before the turkey was $82.15 (no coupons scanned yet).  I got a 21.99 pound bird @ $1.39/lb which cost $30.57.  Now, my store was running a special....the turkey would be $.67/lb if I bought $50 worth of groceries with it!  This dropped $15.83 off of my bird!  Before coupons and before my turkey savings, my total was $96.89.  After the $15.83 turkey savings (biggest coupon EVER!) and my coupons, I only paid $35.47!  A 62% savings!

My store does not double coupons...but if they did....boy....I may have walked out of that store paying almost nothing!

Happy Thanksgiving!