Publix Trip April 5th

Total Cost: $162.18

Savings: $64.05

Total OOP: $98.13

Well, I did a lot of "stocking up" this week because I found so many good deals and had so many coupon match ups. In addition to EVERYTHING in the above picture, I also got a bag of red potatoes, a couple of pounds of sweet potatoes, some onions, some garlic and two newspapers. I ran out of room on my counter! 

Some good match-ups this week:

Wheat Thins Artisan crackers: on sale for BOGO, combine with a coupon from the paper a couple of weeks ago and you can get BOTH boxes BOGO, which means they're both FREE! I did this deal twice and got four boxes. TIP: Make sure you're ready to tell the cashier when you're checking out the exact price of the crackers because then she doesn't have to look it up to write it on your coupon and you're more likely to get THIS deal as opposed to them giving you one BOGO box (at half price) free instead of BOTH boxes free. Does that make sense? I'm confused. :)

Kraft Salad Dressings: on sale for BOGO this week, combine with a $1.50 off one coupon from last week's paper and you get them for about a penny each or less...can't remember the exact price and I'm too lazy to get up and check. :) Either way--it's a good deal. I bought four of these. TIP: This is why it's beneficial to buy more than one paper. The more coupons you have for the particular item, the more times you can do the deal. I typically clip coupons from five papers each week. Sounds like a lot, but if you stack the sheets and cut them at once you're doing five times the work for the same amount of time.

Duncan Hines Cake Mixes: on sale BOGO this week. When combined with a $.35 off coupon from last week's paper, these come out to about $.10 each. As far as I'm concerned, you can never have too many cake mixes, so I usually keep about ten boxes at a time in my pantry. This was a great deal so I did it five times.  TIP: Did you know you can replace the oil in a recipe for a cake or brownie mix with applesauce to reduce the fat and calories of your baked goods? You can use this trick in almost any (sweet) recipe that calls for oil. Usually I do half and half so that you still get richness from the oil, but if you're making cupcakes for your kids and you want to cut back on the fat, go ahead and replace it all. They'll never know the difference and you're getting in an extra serving of fruit. Just make sure you buy the "no sugar added" kind of sauce. WHICH IS BOGO at Publix this week! Stock up! :)

Tropicana 50 Juice: This is Tropicana's new low-sugar orange juice and I hadn't tried it yet, so I thought this week since it was BOGO and I had a $1.00 off coupon it was worth trying for a buck. I don't do artificial sweeteners, so I'm going to have to check on the make-up of this TruVia deal that they've put in there. It's supposedly a plant extract, but I'm not sure exactly how "natural" it is...I'll do some homework on that and get back to you. We'll see if the juice is any good too.

Farm Rich French Toast Sticks: These were BOGO several weeks ago and my store was out, so I got a rain check. TIP: If EVER your store is out of a particular item that's on great sale that week, go to the customer service desk on your way out and ask for a rain check. Save your coupons and when your store restocks, you can use the rain check in combination with your coupons and still get your great deal.

"Buy Theirs Get Ours Free" Sale: Publix does these sales from time to time and I love them. They'll put their store brand up against a national brand and if you pay for the national brand, they'll GIVE you a FREE bag of the store brand to "compare". Well, I already know that Publix' brand is good, but I'll gladly take anything for free! This week I got the Quaker Rice Snacks for $2.99  and then used a $1.00 off coupon and then I got the Publix brand for free. I did the same thing with the Organic Corn chips. We can always use corn chips for something and getting both bags for about $3.99 was worth it to me for organics even though I didn't have a coupon.

Of course we had to get some eggs for dyeing this week with the kids and I got a few other incidentals that we needed. My grand total came to $98.13. Now this is definitely more than I usually spend, but this is Spring Break and my husband is home and so we'll go through more food this week than we usually would. Also I bought a couple of more expensive proteins this week, although we're going to eat on them ALL week (meal plan to follow). Anyhow, even with spending $98.13, I still saved $64.00. That's a pretty good deal, I'd say. Hope you have great success this week...let me know how you did!