May Grocery Shopping Trip

Since going back to school and saving up for new gutters for the house, I have to be more careful and try to spend a lot less money than I used to spend. I've been trying some new strategies for a couple of months which seems to help. Here are the strategies in no particular order:

• I meal plan for three to four weeks (or the rest of the credit card cycle) at a time. Then I make one big shopping trip and get everything I can that will not spoil and can be frozen if needed.
• I've also started shopping at Aldi again. I'm an Aldi kid, so I never had anything against Aldi. I have memories of shopping with my mom and the cart overflowing with a large haul to last us a month or so.
• When I see items I know I use on a regular basis on sale at other stores, I will stock up on them. I hit a great sale at Meijer a while back and stocked up on things like baggies and frozen veggies. I've even found fresh Perdue chicken breasts on sale and bought a bunch of them to freeze.
• I've worked really hard on not impulse shopping or shopping because I'm upset or bored. This gave me more time to do things such as read textbooks, write papers, and other grad school related stuff. 
• Even though I gained some weight back, I haven't been out buying as many sale items as I can to have a variety of clothes. I deal with the fact that I have three pairs of dress pants and three pairs of jeans that fit. I just do laundry more often. I'm not planning on staying a size 16 forever, so I'm not going to give myself any slack to do so.

Here is most of my grocery shopping for May. I might run out of something or need a fresh ingredient once a in a while, but I've gotten pretty good at estimating what I go through in three to four weeks.

My fresh, refrigerated, and frozen foods from Aldi.

The rest of the food from Aldi.

I found these at the Dollar Tree.

This is the stuff I had to get a regular store (Meijer, Wal-Mart, Strack's).


Although this has nothing to do with the rest of my post, here are some cute pictures I got of the doggies today. Since it was nice, they were able to run outside and play at grandpa's house (he has a fenced in yard, we don't). Needless to say, they are tired tonight!