If You Are Struggling To Pay Your Bills You Need To Read This Post- Part 2- By Popular Demand

If you are struggling to pay your bills- you need to pay attention to this post and read my other post about how you can save money every month for your family. 

This is serious stuff with NO gimmicks!  Anyone - teenagers on up can save money on food, personal care products and household items. 

This post will save many of you the same amount of money you get in a commission check in one closing- so pay attention. 

If you are in debt and want to get that debt paid down and even eliminated- you need to pay attention to this post! 

This is more serious saving! 

I wrote a featured post showing you how we bought over $900 worth of products for just around $64 at Walgreens, CVS and Publix. Those were mostly items for personal care such as shampoo and razors, etc. Many commenters were asking me to show you how we can also do that with our food savings. I included a video of what I bought and how I got the deals. 

I promised I would show you how we cut our food budget by more than one half. 

The video below shows one of our Publix shopping trips. I bought $107 worth of groceries for only $32. That was the best trip I have made in the three months we have been learning how to cut our spending way down, our savings way up and then taking the money we are saving to pay off our debt. 

We go to three grocery stores: Publix, Whole Foods and Target. 

We eat mostly organic and all natural so I never thought that we could really save as much money as we have. This hobby started off as just teaching our daughters how to coupon and use sales to save their young families money. But when I saw the real savings- well- I took a double take! 

The best part is that this has now become a part of our homeschool curriculum! Our seven year old son helps me figure out our menu based on the sales, he has to choose his candy from the sales and only gets it if we get it free. Well, he is getting quite good at consumer math! Incentives! 

He goes to the stores with me and tells all the cashiers, "My mom saves us a lot of money,"as he watches the cash register take off dollar after dollar. He is already making his plans for couponing and shopping sales when he gets older.

 I don't know a better lesson to teach your children: the importance of not going into debt, pay as you go, be responsible and live within your means while saving for the things you want and need. 

We spend a lot of money on food each month. In a typical month we will easily spend $1200 for groceries. But with this coupon and buying on sale strategy- we have cut that budget down to $500 per month. That is more than half! I mean, this is some serious saving. The money that we don't spend is used to pay off our credit cards, kids' college loans and our car loans. This can make a huge dent in your debt too. 

The first thing I did was to learn what we have to eat organic and what we don't have to eat organic. 

Then I learned to create our weekly meal menus based on foods that are on sale rather than making a shopping list from a menu. 

Learning to do this was a bit of a challenge but I made it through with flying colors! 

There are a lot of blogs that moms write where you can learn how to cut your grocery bill in half. 

Some of my favorite sites are: 

WildforWags - this site is run by a Realtor in our area, Christie- who is now my new friend:) 

Totally Target- this is also a site by Christie. 

Iheartpublix

Southernsavers.com

At first I thought it was going to be just junk food but that is not the case. Here are some of the organic and healthy foods:

At Publix they had a sale on Cascadian Farms Frozen Organic Fruits. Our son loves fruit smoothies with vegi protein powder in them. So every morning I make a fresh fruit smoothie with a fresh banana, fresh pineapple and mango- then toss in a handful of frozen organic strawberries. 

Normally at Publix the Cascadian Farm frozen fruit is $4.29 a bag. At Whole Foods, the 365 brand is only $2.99 a bag. So I buy them at Whole Foods. 

Well, Pubix put the Cascadian Farms ones on sale for $1.99 per bag.

Now, that sale was good enough to stock up them at that price but the deal got even better. I printed Publix store coupons from their website for $1.00 of of 2 bags. Then the Cascadian Farm site had coupons for $1.00 off of one bag. So I paid like 49 cents on each bag of organic frozen fruits. 

At Publix, they had a sale on Almond Milk. We don't drink cow or animal milk nor do we drink Soy. Nestor and our little one like the Rice Dream milk but I love the Almond milk and it only has 40 calories per cup.

It was on sale: 2 half gallons for $2.00 each. I had coupons for $1. off of each half gallon so I paid $1 each for Blue Diamond almond milk! The ones I bought are good until the end of August. I calculated how much Almond milk I drink and then bought what I needed to last me until then. Huge savings!

The Paul Newman products all went on sale this month at Publix. I have another video about our Paul Newman savings. We stocked up on Paul Newman brand products at a huge discount. 

 This gives you an idea of how much you can really start saving! If you like this series, let me know and I will continue to video our savings. I explain more in the video:

 

 

 

        

 

 

Copyright © 2010 By Katerina Gasset, All Rights Reserved.*If You Are Struggling To Pay Your Bills- You Need To Read This Post- Part 2- By Popular Demand*