My couponing and shopping the sales challenge

I am not a shopper of clothes, shoes, or other accoutrements but I do love grocery shopping.  I feel the need to make sure that I have enough of everything (and then some) in the house so that if, for some reason, we can’t get out to shop, that there is lots of food in the house to feed everybody (for quite a while, it would seem) ;).  But, as you can imagine, this can be a costly endeavour.  So, I coupon, shop sales, ad match and collect ‘points.’  At the same time, I really want to get the family grocery budget down to no more than $500/month (for a family of seven, including all H&B and gluten-free foods and ingredients).  $500 sounds like, and is, a lot of money.  Until you’re in the stores and see the prices of staples going up, up, up and incomes staying the same.  Then it doesn’t seem like very much at all.

So, this year, I’m challenging myself and will report on here to make me accountable and hopefully keep me honest 🙂  For now, I’ll post my stats monthly – I’m tracking everything in Excel and updating every time I go shopping so nothing gets missed.  My plan is to shop once a week (or twice if I go on the weekend).  No more running to the store for one thing – waste of time, gas, wear and tear and money (because I never get out with just the one thing I went for!) 😉

I mostly shop here in town and do as much of my shopping as possible at Wal-Mart (for the excellent coupon and ad-matching policies)

Here are January’s stats (and they are not pretty, but with most of the stores having their ‘dollar day’ sales, which when combined with coupons resulted in a lot of free products for my family, it turned out to be an excellent month to stock up on things that rarely go on sale for such good prices (especially ‘free!’).

Coupon savings – $337.33
Shopping the Sale Price savings – $321.59
Over Budget – $265.33 (Ouch!)
Number of Shopping Days – 7 (Opps!)

Because I blew the budget in January, I’ll be reducing the budget for February and March to account for the overage.  It’s not so much about the things you do, it’s more about how you recover from the things you do, right? 🙂

Do you shop sales?  How do you keep track of your savings, grocery budget/spending?  Any tips, tricks or secrets to share?  Or does couponing in Canada feel like a waste of time and effort to you when you see what our American neighbours can do with couponing, stacking, doubling, etc.?