Taking some of my own advice and IT WORKS!

I missed my weekly Thursday blog post but I wanted to share with you an example of how I am taking some of my own advice and hopefully encourage you to do the same. This afternoon I was able to save quite a bit of money on groceries, and I wanted to share with you not only how I did it, but also show you how easy it was. At the end of March we went to our local Lowes hardware store and bought a mid sized chest freezer for a little under $300.00. Thats a lot of money on a tight budget, but we have already recouped almost half of that cost with BOGO (Buy-One-Get-One-Free) deals.

This afternoon my wife spent about five minutes online looking at the Harris-Teeter weekly ads and gave me a list of things that we use that were on sale. She checks the Harris-Teeter, Lowe's Foods, Food Lion, and Bi-Lo online ads each week to see what deals they offer that we use. Keep in mind a great deal on something that you don't use is not such a good deal after all. If you save the weekly coupons in the newspaper and a few from the daily junk mail, you can save quite a lot of money in addition to the BOGO deals. Most of the things we buy that are on sale are the staple items that we would buy at full cost anyway. Many times we can get higher quality name brand items such as cereal and lunch box stuffers with BOGO deals at half the cost of the store brands. The same goes for a lot of items that we buy using coupons.

Today for example, the grocery list that my wife gave me totaled $122.44 and I spent $67.19 saving $55.25. The way I look at it is that I just saved one sixth of the total cost of our new freezer. Since I have had at least three other BOGO trips since March, we have saved about half of the cost of the freezer. She gave me another list for tomorrow afternoon for Bi-Lo. Just with the BOGO items we will get $72.00 worth of food for $36.00 and that does not include using any coupons that she is still looking through. As far as I'm concerned $91.25 of free food in one week is not a bad return for investing only ten minutes of her time. If you are keeping tally, that's saving one third the cost of the freezer in only one week.

Now keep in mind its not all about just saving money. Remember my catch phrase about building happier, more secure, and more self sufficient lives for our families? Often times when we prepare for even minor emergences we are actually prepared for larger emergences. My wife is going to have surgery sometime in the next month or so. We bought the freezer to save money but we are going to reap larger benefits in the near future by having that larger frozen storage capacity that we did not have with our refrigerator freezer. We are planning to prepare several meals and casseroles in advance and freeze them. Some of our friends and family are planning to bring us some meals during my wife's recovery period. If several people bring food at one time we can freeze some of it and have no waste.

If you guys are using some of my ideas and techniques to build happier, more secure, and more self sufficient lives for your families let me know and don't forget to share those successes with others. By sharing our successes we all grow stronger. You can email me at larrygriffin@carolina.rr.com or drop in for a visit on Facebook. I am always happy to share ideas with others and hopefully answer some of your questions.