Commissary Savings of 23%

This week's commissary run yielded my lowest percentage savings as of yet, but then again i only used four coupons and a lot of the items on my list were fresh vegetables or other non-coupon items. The coupons that I used were:

• Free bread from last week's Sunday paper: -$2.09
• Free Crystal Light from Kraft's buy 3 products offer in All You: -$2.50
• Free Dressing from Kraft's buy 3 products offer in All You: $-1.69
• $0.75/1 Mrs. Dash 10 minute marinade

My total savings were $7.03. Like I mentioned, this is my lowest savings this month at the commissary, but this week's menu plan and grocery list called for a lot of non-coupon items, so I'm not too bummed by this low savings. But this week, I will be feeding our family for less than $25...and one of our meals include ribs. Yummmmy!

What has really helped us stick to our budget is to only buy items that we need for the week's meals. I put together my weekly grocery list in three money-saving steps:

1. Put together the next week's menu plan and write down the ingredients I'm missing
2. Head on over to the commissary website to check out their sales for coupon match-ups. Occasionally I will buy sale items that I don't have coupons for, but they generally need to be marked down at least 60% for me to do that.
   
3. Go through my coupons and see if there's any high-value coupons that will allow me to get items that we need for less than a dollar.
   

So far, we still have $35 left in our commissary budget. This is a HUGE achievement for us, because August consisted of 5 Saturdays (read: commissary trip) instead of the regular 4, meaning we had only $40 instead of $50 each week to play with. The fact that we still managed to have $35 left in the budget even with a long month is an amazing fact that I can only contribute to menu planning and strict adherence to the grocery list.