My first "Deals I've Scored" post

Alright, so, I'm supposed to take a friend grocery shopping tomorrow to show her the ropes, but I needed to go to the store today to get some stuff for our Chili Cook-Off tomorrow (woot!), so I figured I'd get my shopping out of the way so I can focus more on helping her get some sweet deals. I stopped off at Walgreens first, where I paid .10 for 5-5 lb. bags of Gold Medal flour, 2 Planters Trail Mixes and a Scotch Bubble Mailer.

Then I headed to Winn-Dixie to get some Kelloggs fruit snacks and ended up paying .98 for 4 boxes (there was a fluke with a Vocalpoint $1.50/1 I had; it rang up twice for the two boxes of the alphabet shaped snacks, weird, but the cashier didn't mind, sweet!).

Then I headed to KMart to test the $10/20 Q and do the Huggies Diaper deal. It worked after they entered it manually at Customer Service so I got 2 jumbo packs of Huggies and a Colgate toothpaste for $7.17, and supposedly a $3 credit is getting added to my rewards card so I can apply that to the twin air mattress I have to pick up tomorrow for camp. I kind of wish I would've gone ahead and gotten the mattresses today instead, now that they've fixed the coupon to list the locations it's valid at.

Finally, I headed to Publix, the big mama of the shopping day. There were a few really good deals I couldn't pass up. Seriously, it's really sad, but this month I'm already over budget (cringe). I know, I know. And I was doing the cash system and everything. I thought I was so disciplined. But, my rationalization is that if I get a few things now that are a STEAL, like diapers and the like, then I won't have to spend money on them in the coming months. Excuses, I know. There were just so many sale items that had MQs and SQs that I was going crazy. Ready for the total? Best yet:

Spent: $27.84 (most of which was stuff we had to get for LeRand to make a white chili for the thing tomorrow, and for me to make a dessert)

Saved: $141.12

A savings of: 83.5%

Good deal. And a lot of it was stuff we'd been needing for a while. So, yeah, I felt the need to post it this time. A man stopped me when he saw my binder open as I was shopping and he asked me a bunch of questions and was really interested. Then after my forever-long check-out, which I was apologizing profusely for, my cashier offhandedly mentioned that I needed to teach her how to save like that, to which I replied that I would LOVE to teach her and that I'll let her know when I'm teaching my class next month. How neat to have an actual Publix cashier there?

February Totals

Thanks to a big boost from our federal tax return we had a stellar month (no thanks to UT state tax, lame-o). We were able to pay a whopping 27.4% of the original total. That means that after two months we have 59.4% of the total to go. And we were thinking it was a stretch to pay it by Dec. 31st! Bah! We've moved our new goal up to the hub's birthday, July 25th. Which, if we attain, we won't be together to celebrate for, due to family vacation reasons. BUT, I'm more than happy to celebrate over the phone, or Skype, or any way, in this case. With his income alone (which is our only constant cash flow at the moment) the numbers don't add up, but we're confident that things will work out, as long as we continue to assess wants and needs and keep trying to sacrifice.

On to how I did this month with the budget:

Shelf cost: $918.30

Coupon savings: $352.79

Savings Rate: 79.22%

Amount remaining in budget: $1.00

:)