I love saving money at the grocery store

I love grocery shopping, especially when I get to save money or use money saved to buy treats. I am by no means a coupon queen of any sort, I just clip ones I know my family will need/use and then actually use most of them. Today's shopping trip was no different.

We usually get the majority of our groceries from Meijer. Yes, Walmart is sometimes cheaper but their produce sucks. The same goes for Aldi. We only really grocery shop at Walmart if we only need to pick up a couple of things or the produce will be used that day. We shop at Aldi when we don't have a huge list and we know things are cheaper there.

So today's grocery list looked a bit like this:

• Potatoes - 5 lb. bags - 3
• Carrots - 1 lb. bags - 2
• Avocados - 4
• Tomatoes
• Lettuce
• Mushrooms - 2
• At least $15 worth of beef - ground beef & steaks
• Ribs
• American cheese - 2
• Q-Tips
• Napkins
• Kleenex - 3
• Dish soap
• Trash bags - 39 gal.
• BBQ sauce
• Knorr pasta
• Sugar
• Pudding - 5
• Gun
• Bread - 3
• Hamburger buns
• English muffins - 3
• Bugles
• Old Orchard frozen juice - 4
• Toaster strudel - 3
• Chicken strips - 2
• Pizza rolls - 2

Because Meijer has their 10/$10 get the 11th free promotion going on and a lot of the above list was on that promotion (plus I had coupons!) I expected to spend less than $100. Other sale items not listed in the flyer caught my eye, however, and caused the total to rise a bit. Oops!

We ended up getting all of the above list plus:

• Seedless watermelon
• Bananas
• Newspaper
• Pretzels
• Pepsi
• Milk
• Bologna

All of this adds up to $175.60.

We were able to get 3 free items by purchasing 33 items on the 10/$10 list. The savings for today totaled $5.75 in Meijer promotions, $39.23 in non-coupon savings and $6.55 in coupons. This included paper coupons from the newspaper or printed online or from a Meijer register and Meijer Mperks digital coupons. That's a total savings of $51.53 and brought our total down to $124.07.