March 2012 Budget Results.......Food and Toiletries Spending

Here are my FOOD BUDGET spending totals for MARCH 2012.

I have posted March's totals on the right side bar under Total Grocery Savings for 2012 and updated the Yearly Totals.
I am listing subtotals for each store I purchased from in March.  If you aren't interested in that much detail, just skip to the bottom for the Totals Summary.

My spending includes Food, Toiletries/HBA, Pet Supplies, Cleaning Products, Paper Goods & tax where applicable.We are a family of 5(3-4 at home this month)& 2 dogs. No kids under 16.
******************

BAKERY OUTLET
OOP   $12.67

Value   $36.01

Savings  64.82%

RITE-AID DRUG STORE
OOP  $2.99 put on free R-A gift card so $0.00 OOP

Qs/Ads/+Ups $104.87

Value  $107.86

Savings  100%

SHURSAVE STORES(small local independent affiliated stores)
OOP  $230.24

Qs/Ads  $203.57

Value  $433.81

Savings  46.93%

WEIS MARKETS

OOP  $268.36

Qs/Ads  $280.99

Value  $549.35

Savings  51.15%

I don't track Rite-Aid's +Ups here, nor CVS's ECBs & Walgreen's RRs. They will be included when used on purchases under "Coupons".   I'll keep track of what rebates are received monthly.  Rebate money/gift cards will be considered 'income' & will go into the Food/Toiletries budget, offsetting the Out of Pocket. Cash will go immediately into the Budget kitty, while Gift Cards will be calculated in when spent.

REBATE CHECKS RECEIVED IN MARCH
Brita Filters....$10.00

Rite-Aid SCR....$6.99
Subtotal........$16.99

GIFT CARDS and CERTIFICATES
Nothing

TOTAL Value of Cash/Store Checks/Gift Card Rebates Received...$16.99

COUPONS and FREEBIES

2 x Suave Shampoo FREE ITEM Q

1 x P&G  FREE Cover Girl Mascara

*********************
My best 3 Store Savings Totals were Rite-Aid at 100%, the Bakery Outlet at 64.82%, and Weis at 51.15%.

I shopped at 4 different stores in March.


TOTAL Out of Pocket........$511.27

TOTAL Coupons & Store Sales Savings...$615.76

TOTAL Value of Items Purchased............$1127.03

TOTAL Savings of...................................54.64%


TOTAL of CASH Rebates........................$16.99
TOTAL Out of Pocket After Rebates........$494.28
TOTAL Savings including Rebates...........$632.75
TOTAL Value of Items Purchased............$1127.03
TOTAL Savings After Rebates...................56.14%

This closes out the March spending.

THOUGHTS & COMMENTS for this month.....
I went into March with $300 budgeted for food/toiletries for the month and $176.80 carried over from food monies I didn't spend in Jan. and Feb......so I had $476.80 potentially to spend this past month.

And spend it I did!lol

I spent that AND another $17.48.

But I am ok with spending what I did.  I used the extra cash to stock up on some good deals on meat. By combining annual sales on corned beef in March with clearance deals and store instant discount coupons on end of date items I could stick in the freezer, I got 12+lbs. of fresh ground meat, 12lbs. of Angus burgers, 6 lbs. of fish, 6 corned beef briskets and another roasting chicken too for great prices.

I also did some instant Catalina deals to stock up on "good" pancake syrup, pasta sauces and supply #2 son with quality junk food.lol
My freezer is once again packed to the gills.

LOOKING AHEAD TO APRIL.....
With Easter this week, I'll be doing a bit of shopping soon.  As for the other 3 weeks in April, I don't see me hitting the stores much at all, except for milk and an odd ingredient or two I might need. 

I will be keeping my food budget at $300 for March.  Hopefully no great deals appear so I won't spend so much in April.

How did you do in March with your Food Budget? 


Please leave a comment or link to your post and let us hear about your progress!  By sharing our struggles and efforts we can help each other stick to our budgets and learn to be better guardians of our resources.

Sluggy

Fabs Abs Friday Tribute

SonyaAnn always posts a cute guy(or at least his cute body parts!lol)on her blog each week.
It's called Fab Abs Friday.

Go check it out sometime if you are into eye candy.
It's fun and frivolous and by Friday, don't we all need frivolous really?

I've told her many times what makes a guy good looking for me.
Sleek physiques or good hair and chiseled faces do it for some.

But for me?
I can get turned on by any man as long as he can do the dishes, clean the floor and do the laundry.

Ok, so maybe this Calendar is a better idea.......

Or even these Postcards called "Porn for Women"......

I hear the one of the guy scrubbing the toilet is really hot!

But beyond a man who can do chores without being reminded, do you know what turns me on??

A man who can......


TapDance!
And if he can tap dance and strip at the same time?....even better.

And if that hoofer is also a famous actor whom I love, well baby, that's got my name written all over it!!

Here's my contribution to Fab Abs Friday......enjoy!



Sluggy

The Wearing of The Grey

 *Get ready to hit the Unfollow Button*

I've been immersed the last couple of days in my genealogy stuff.

Genealogy is like a big jigsaw puzzle of history, but on a personal level.
You find clues to people by finding someone and leapfrogging around and back to another person.

Like yesterday.
I spent 5 hours, tracing the movement of 4 generations of a family, both moving physically in the world and moving through the changes in the family structure that is brought on by time.

All this tracing and cross referencing of 8 decades of a family's members to try to find where someone in that grouping would cross over into the path of the particular person I wanted to find.
Sometimes if you can't find a person directly, you can locate them in this way.

But it was not to be in this case.

I could look at it as a waste of 5 hours but since I am fascinated by people's lives from the past
and I thoroughly enjoyed myself poking around in their closets, I am ok with it.

Currently I am noodling around in my mother's side of the family.  Her side is the one that has deep roots in America.
By deep I mean pre-Revolutionary times.  Not all but quite a few branches...or should that be roots.lol
And most, if not all are in Virginia.

My roots are country roots, not city roots.  Many of them were planted in south central VA, in the Campbell and Charlotte Counties of the state.  The land of farms and rural life.

Here's a bridge over the Falling River(a branch of the Roanoke River)....

And here's an old mill on the Falling River, called Harper's Mill....

My grandfather was born a Harper.  That grist mill belonged to someone in our Harper family.  Many of the Harpers I am descended from were millers by trade.

I found myself out of one of the limbs on that side of my tree yesterday and I had progressed back to the 1860's era.
1860's as in Civil War.....in the South.
And I have begun to unearth(bad pun)Confederate soldiers in the family.

Due to my ancestors involvement in the Civil War and also how I find myself connected to and how I feel about that whole time in history I have been exploring that era of our nation's history anew.

And I want to say that the teaching of American history to our children is sorely lacking in this country.
The amount of time the school's spent on teaching history was a lot longer during my generation than it is in today's schools.
What my 2 college student kids were taught up to Grade 12 was barely anything compared to what my generation was expected to know.
And I am finding what the last kid I have in high school is being taught is so dumbed down, it's ridiculous.  And he goes to one of the best(credentials of teachers/test scores) public schools in this region!

History is NOT considered important in the schools anymore since knowing/learning it doesn't directly help you find a job when you graduate.  And that's what they concentrate on nowadays in high school.....on teaching to the test and vocational learning.

But it IS still important if you want to be an informed member of society.
You need to know what happened in the past so as to know who you are and how to NOT repeat the mistakes your ancestors made.

And though my generation did indeed spend more time on history as a subject in school, we were focused on all the wrong things.
We were drilled on knowing dates, events, names....the WHOs, WHATs, WHEREs.  Not enough time was spent learning about the WHYs of history.

Why things happened.....like Why the Civil War happened.

The textbooks of my youth were very general in their whys, and some whys where ignored or downright incorrect or just missing.
And as a Southerner I am going to tell you something about all those pages in your history textbooks won't.

That the North, being the victor in That War Between the States, they got to decide on how this era would be recorded and how the history would be written and passed down to future generations.
The names, dates and facts may be correct but the whys are colored and skewed toward the victor's side.  Or pieces of the Whys are totally missing if the 'powers that be' thought those parts would make them look bad to posterity.  While the South had better generals, the North had better SPIN DOCTORS when the war was over. ;-)

The WHYS of history is not so simplistic.
There isn't good or evil.....no black or white.
History is shades of grey at best.

As a Southerner I was/am always made to feel less than, especially when the Civil War came up.
Not just personally by folks I've met from "Up North" when I was a kid, but from the textbooks in my school down to films, songs, books and other aspects of our national culture.
Being a Northerner was good, being a Southerner was bad.  The South had slavery so that made us evil.
I guess it's easier just to label us the bad guys and ignore the complicity of the North in that whole economic system.  It's easier to think yourself superior to someone else and look down upon them.

Not to start a new war here but there are many folks out there who harbor many misguided notions about the South.
About who we are/were.....about our history.
And just because "we" like a certain flag and song, it doesn't make "us" racists.
It's been almost 147 years since the war ended and I still find myself having to fight the battle some days when I hear some ignorant opinion fly out of someone's mouth up here in Yankeeland.

Being from the South is complicated.

Events going back to the Tariff Act of 1828(bonus points if you even know what this was)have changed the course of our nation's history.
And until this country can have an intelligent dialogue about how the South was treated since before the founding of the first colonies through today, we are doomed to relive and repeat the past.

Sluggy-Proud daughter of Virginia

Food Shopping Trip.....Don't Look SonyaAnn!

This will upset reader SonyaAnn....not because I got some ok deals but because of what I got the deal on.
Fortunately for her, she doesn't live near the store I got this deal from so it's all good. ;-)

I thought I'd be boring today and show you what I just bought at the grocery store.

First I have to show you this.....

This is a sheet of store coupons that was wrapped around my local independent ShurSave grocery flyer at the beginning of March.  It's a bunch of store coupons for items they carry and they are good for the entire month of March.
Now, always thinking moi realized that I should KEEP this flyer wrap of coupons and not throw them out when I threw out the sales flyer into the recycling pile.
And always thinking moi realized that I should grab about 12 sales flyers that week with this wrapper of coupons, so I would have 12 more copies of these coupons to hang onto and wait for these items to go on sale during the month, because only a couple of them were on sale the week the coupons were on the flyer.
I figured the store wouldn't keep printing the same coupons each sales week and wrap each week's flyer with them.....and I was correct!

So I clipped those coupons and set off to the store today.

Let's begin with this.....

I LOVE Blue Bunny ice cream.
The Cherry Bordeaux with dark chocolate chips is orgasmic!

But the grocery store hasn't had it on sale all month and it wasn't in the ad for this week either.
But there was a $3 WYB3 cartons coupon on that sheet.
And guess who saw a big old sign hanging on the ice cream case door--Blue Bunny on sale 3 for $10.
So after my $3 coupon I paid $7 for 3 cartons-that's $2.33 each?

I just may have to buy that second freezer this week..... ;-)

I also bought this.....

Instant Catalina Deal--Buy 7 select Heinz products, Get $5 off your order.

The Classico sauce was $2 ea. on sale.
The Bagel Bites were $2 ea. on sale. (For #2 Son)
The Ore-Ida onion rings were $3 on sale. (For #2 Son)
Subtotal of $15.
One of my store coupons was for Ore-Ida products, $1/1.
Grand total after coupon and instant discount......$9.00 for all 7 items.

Again, #2 Son has put in a request for more Bagel Bites and Sweet Potato Fries and you never can have too much pasta sauce so we'll seriously be needing that 2nd freezer.

I also bought this.....

2 x Salad Kits on sale $1.99 ea.(My lunch for the next couple days.)
1 x On-Cor Meat thing on sale $3.(I don't feel like cooking from scratch today.lol)
1 x block of Provolone Cheese on sale $2 (I never see Provolone cheese outside of the deli here and it's much higher than this price.)
2 x Gala apples on sale .99¢ lb.(I need these for a pie I am baking this week.)

I have a $1/1 store coupon from that sheet for the On-Cor as well, so that was $2 in the end.

All together, it was $51.43 worth of stuff for $24.85 OOP.  51.70% savings rate with just sale prices, store coupons and that instant cat deal.

I am just turning into a food spender, aren't I?
What good deals have you gotten lately?

Sluggy

Sluggy's Boring Blog Giveaway Box......Enter Now!

Here's a NEW POST for Sluggy's Boring Blog Giveaway Box......Enter Now!

Just to recap, I put things in the box(mostly what I have gotten for free or almost free)each week and when the box is filled we draw a winner from all the entries received.

This lot of goodies FILLED THE BOX, so this is your last chance/week to enter to win this stuff!

Here is what went into the Box today.....

1. Got 2B Hair Gel

2. Mentos Lemonade Gum

3. StayFree thin pads

4. Aveeno Lotion

5. Nivea Lip Balm(cherry flavor)

This makes a total of 18 high quality items you win if I pick your name! (Except if you live in Canada, see the rules about that.)

If this is your first time, please go read all the rules for these Giveaways HERE.

Time to enter.....You can enter on this Giveaway post only.

1 entry per person per day on THIS POST.  Leave your name/email addy and a COMMENT on any topic you wish for a valid entry on THIS POST, not on any of the previous weeks' posts. There will be a link on the top of the side bar to the current Giveaway Post so you can find it easily.

Please NOTE--You MUST be a follower to enter the Giveaway.  If you aren't one, just click on the "Follow" button on the right hand side of my blog to become a follower.

There are 2 ways to get extra entries and  you can do these 2 each this week!....

1. Put my blog on your blog's Blogroll.  Leave an extra comment for this entry on THIS POST with the URL of your blog so I can make go check it out. If I'm already on your Blogroll, say so in this extra comment/entry.
2.  Blog about this Giveaway on your blog or on a Message Board.  Leave an extra comment for this entry on THIS POST with a link to your blog post or the message on the board.

So you get your basic entry, you can get another entry for having/putting me on your blog's roll and/or for blogging about the giveaway PLUS you can leave 1 comment per day additional on this post for a daily bonus entry.

That's 1 basic entry each day for the next 8 days, 2 additional entries if you blog about or put me on your blogroll and 8 bonus daily entries for the next 8 days=a possible 18 entries for everyone this week.
 

I will close this post to comments at 11:59 pm on Wednesday, April 4th 2012.
The winner will be announced the next day or two when I get time to count all the entries, draw a name randomly and post it to the blog.

Any questions?  Just email me.

Happy Entering!! 

Sluggy