Rite Aid deals starting March 31

P&G circular in today's paper! Also I found a free source for P&G circulars without having to buy the paper, its the free spanish newspapers!! I love it, its so easy to get and now I look forward to the P&G deals.  This April circular has a really great coupon for Dawn Hand Renewal Dish Detergent, get a $1 off when you buy 2.  It's on sale at Rite Aid for $.97 so if you buy 2 and use coupon its only $.47 each!!!!! To top this deal off there's a buy $30 worth of certain P&G products and get a $10 UP reward!  

If you were really Gung Ho about this you could literally get 32 bottles for about $.17 each! But that would take multiple transactons since P&G has a limit of 4 coupons per day .

The other deal I really like is the Olay Bars at Bo50% because even though its not free with this deal and coupons you can get a bar for about $.20 each, which is a super deal!

Also worth noting, is the POST cereal deal, its not as great as the last one with UP rewards, but if you have the $1 off coupons there on sale 2 for $5 and if you use 2 of your coupons.  You'd get them for $1.50 each!

February Rite Aid Haul : My Couponing Evaluation

I got a little lazy with the Haul photo for February because I had already stored away most of my stuff so not included is the Maxi Pads and Ragu Pasta sauce.  Either way you can see I was a little lazy that month.

So what I've started doing is evaluating the effectiveness of my own personal couponing.  The first thing I do is make a list of the items I got and actual money spent.  Then taking same list put the realistic price I would as a frugal shopper have paid for the item.  It's important to note, I'm not listing the Retail Price because that would really inflate my numbers because its not a part of my reality to ever pay Retail price.  So for this to be an accurate evaluation for me, I'm using my own personal price points.

So for all the items I bought my price point total would have been $106.50 not including sales tax. Notice, I didn't even count the Cover Girl and Revlon stuff because I would never buy it in my every day life.  

Guess the amount I acutally spent...

$ 19.96  

( this takes into account the $10 up I carried over from January and $10 Rebate I've submitted for)

and I still have $23.99 in UP Rewards to use in March

So my February couponing at Rite Aid saved me $86.54 !!!

81% savings basically I paid only 19% of the cost of my items and to be fair since I didn't account for sales tax I really should make my savings 91%.

And to put things in perspective I think about the time I spent (outside of work) to do this and how much I would need to work to pay for this stuff.

So to buy $106.50 worth of stuff and assuming you pay around 30% in taxes, you would need to Earn

$150.56 !  Assuming you make $17 an hour which most people do not you would need to work 8.86 HOURS !!!  That's over a days work!!! My savings this month saved me from working 7.2 Hours just to pay for living essentials.  Or if you were thinking of taking a second job, consider this which would be more effective working an extra 7.2 hours at a second job (consider that most second jobs don't pay well and you will have to consider commuting costs, extra food costs ) or just couponing?  That is what my favorite book this year "Miserly Moms" put into perspective for me.

And if I had done a retail price as a comparison look at the first item on my list the 10 Energy Saver Light bulbs I got had a retail price of over $7 each! That would have meant over $70 on just light bulbs alone.  And it would really have inflated my numbers and been misleading for me to effectively evaluate my couponing.

Freegan Meal Ideas

One of the most common obstacles, I used to face when wanting a Tuna Sandwich was never having Celery , bread or Mayo on hand.  So while I was lucky enough to get Celery on one of my more recent hauls, it gave me the prefect idea to make a Tuna Sandwich.  I even instead of mayo used some of the packaged coleslaw packs (I had stretched to a potato salad) to stretch my tuna further.  Basically I added canned tuna, mixed it with my potato cole slaw, some chopped celery and added on to a bed of kale (also from my organic salad freegan find) and put on seeded Italian bread!

This has to be one of the fanciest tuna sandwiches I've ever made and everything but the tuna was from my Freegan food rescues.

Freegan Meal : Simple Italian snack

I was too lazy to post a freegan haul where I got a bunch of fancy OIL, like this one pictured but I've started using it and man I wished I had room to carry more.  I remember that night, I'd just gotten out of the gym and by chance was walking by a Fancy Supermarket and saw this lady with a large suit case.  She was the who pointed me too the super clean bag of just OILs.  I got some grapeseed oil, steak sauces, imported italian basting oil, chiptole oil.. you get the idea.  The thing is my frugal self... would never ever have shelled out that much money for OIL but dang using this stuff has been a delight!!!!!

Back to my post, a simple italian meal is just bread and super good olive oil. You just cut the fresh bread and dip straight into the oil.  And its amazing!  This snack pictured is a 100% freegan.

Freegan Lunch

I've been super busy lately so not much time to post about what I've done with my last haul.  But basically all last week, I've eaten mostly  for free and still have foods in my freezer.  Because the thing is aside from bread, you never know what you'll find so its good to ration what you find too.  Basically Sunday night, I made huge batch of my favorite split pea soup and filled it with a ton of veggies from my haul.  I basically alternated that with salads and the huge batch of pineapple fried rice I made.  I also during the week stir fried the mushrooms and snap peas and long beans.  For breakfast, I had black berry oatmeal and blue berry oatmeal.  I also had some smoothies as well.  Honestly, this has been the healthiest I've eaten in ages!

But today, I had a second so I'd thought I'd post on what I ate for lunch today.

So I got this Hero from my most recent food rescue and the price if I had when inside and bought it a couple hours before would have been $6.99 !!!!! Ridiculous right.

Anyways, I felt really lazy about making lunch today so I decided to eat half of this sandwich for lunch.  I even added some organic baby kale from my freegan salad mix find to jazz it up.

An easy free lunch!!!!

Freegan NYC haul

I'm feeling super blessed.. I went the other night on a food rescue.. and I got there pretty late but this super nice woman gave me extras of her finds.  She apparently lives in the area and goes practically every day with her hubbie and just gave me what she considered some of her cleanest and best finds.  She gave me two boxed sandwiches and some premium bread and Hillshire Farm Sliced Sandwich meat!!!!!  Talk about super nice!  You do not want to know how much that stuff costs at a NYC supermarket.  And even better was I found Oscar Myer Center Cut Bacon, more wrapped sandwiches, lots more organic boxed salads and green beans!  I know that most people think diving is gross but this is NYC its not gross at all for the most part we have so many rules for garbage to avoid fines and its not residential garbage.  For example, there was one huge clear bag of just FRENCH Bread being thrown out.  And another huge bag with pastry paper and all their bakery garbage.  I grabbed a bunch of sweets, like muffins, donuts, scones etc (lots of which I already ate).  Even being late on arrival, me and my buddy took tons of stuff home on this one trip and had to leave a ton behind. 

Being on the conservative side, my haul alone could easy be worth $100!  This is almost better than couponing!

Freegan Meal

Sometimes, I just get so lazy and want to quickly microwave a meal.  But at the same time the most difficult part of batch cooking is getting your Veggies in.  I personally, just hate hate making salads, I hate chopping and drying veggies.  So finding all that packaged salad was like godsend to me.  So in an effort to use my freegan findings.  

I made a huge batch of fried plantains from the 4 that I rescued.

There was a lot more but I ate it so fast and was to lazy to take a picture after it was fresh and hot.  Seriously it was so yummi and it was my first time making it.  

So I basically ate 1/2 the salad in this prepackaged box and about 2 plantains worth fried.  I still contend it was a healthy meal because of the salad and plantains are healthy too.

AWESOME freegan meal!!

what I did with the rest