Here's what's new:

Crystal’s $99 Kroger Grocery Shopping Trip

If you’re new here, I practice the Buy Ahead Principle — which means that what we buy each week is often for future weeks. We stock up on the best deals and markdowns each week and that means that we then have a variety of items from previous shopping trips to use to plan a menu from.

With the increase in grocery prices, I’ve decided to raise our grocery budget to $100 a week because I’ve not been having enough wiggle room to stock up like I’d want to. This amount will still challenge me to be creative while also giving me enough breathing room to stock up and continue to practice the Buy Ahead Principle.

In addition to practicing the Buy Ahead Principle, I Reverse Meal Plan. This means that I plan based upon what we have on hand plus what good sales/markdowns I found at the stores. (Read more about Reverse Meal-Planning here.)

{Follow me on Instagram stories for real-time videos on what I’m buying if you don’t want to have to wait for me to get the post written up for the blog!}

Here’s what I bought for $99.78 at Kroger this week…

I was excited to find so many meat and bread markdowns. I stick these in the freezer to use for future weeks.

And I finally found a chicken deal!! It feels like markdowns and sales on chicken have been so few and far between, so I was thrilled to find three big packages marked down!

This was a pretty good deal on bacon! I buy it and freeze it to use for breakfast for dinner nights.

The kids asked for cereal and I not only picked up the big boxes of Kellogg’s cereal on sale for $1.79/box this week (plus, you can get a free book from Kellogg’s for each box you buy!) and I found Cascadian Farms cereal marked down to $0.99/box!