My local Safeway has been trying to win back business from competitors, and recently began running coupons offering 250 bonus Air Miles with $100 grocery purchase, or 500 bonus Air Miles with a $200 grocery purchase.
As a frugal grocery shopper, committed to paying the cheapest price possible for our food, I keep a detailed spreadsheet with products, sizes, and the lowest price I’ve ever seen our favourite products sold at.
Some people think meal planning is for the anal, controlling, Type A mom. As a slacker mom, my goal is always to spend less time on the things I must do (cleaning the house, feeding the kids, doing the laundry) and more time on the things I want to do (reading with the kids, scrapbooking by myself, girls’ nights out). So for me, meal planning is about making more time for me, not being some bionic super mom.
Even when I meal plan, I still slack off.
I’ve been a huge fan of meal planning ever since my husband and I were on the television show Fixing Dinner. We have all of host Sandi Richard’s cookbooks, including her latest, Eating Forward, and plan our meals one to three weeks in advance.
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Sarah Deveau’s first memory of saving up to buy something she really, really wanted was at age five, when she saved her allowance and birthday money for six months to buy a mini waterbed for her Cabbage Patch doll. She’s been in love with money every since; making it, spending it, and saving it too.
The author of two personal finance books, Money Smart Mom: Financially Fit Parenting, and Sink or Swim: Get Your Degree Without Drowning in Debt, Sarah’s work has also appeared in Today’s Parent magazine, the Calgary Herald, and other newspapers and magazines across Canada.
Shortly after her first daughter was born, Sarah opened her own business, an award-winning children’s consignment boutique in Airdrie, Alberta. But once daughters two and three came along, she closed her store to invest in a lakeside farmhouse on 40 acres in rural Nova Scotia. Sarah and her high school sweetheart husband plan to move east within the next ten years and semi-retire before the kids hit high school, made possible by the everyday money decisions they’re making now.
Whatever your financial goals, be it a vacation home, college savings for the kids, or getting out of debt and stop cringing at credit card statements, this blog is for you.
Follow Sarah on Twitter: @SarahDeveau
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