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Crystal’s $113 grocery shopping purchases this past week

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!}

It was a super full week this past week, so I opted to do a grocery pickup order. I don’t get quite as great of deals this way — since I can’t shop the markdowns and the shopper doesn’t always get things exactly right so that all my coupons come off the way I envision — but it’s still a good option to stock up on sale items!

We had $128 left in the grocery budget for this week and here’s what I bought:

I was especially happy for the $5.99 bags and blocks of cheese (32 ounces each) — I stocked up and got 7 bags/blocks! We already had two big bags of cheese in the freezer, so we should be set on cheese for awhile!

I also was excited about the raspberries/blackberries for $1.49 with the digital coupon, sausage for $2.49 with the digital coupon, 3 colored peppers for $2.49 with the digital coupon, and the pancake mix for $1.67.

We also got frozen pizza and ice cream to have on hand since they were pretty good prices.

My total at Kroger was a little over $107.

In addition, the 107-load bottle of laundry detergent I got on Black Friday for $5.24 shipped! So all totaled, I spent around $113.