How I filled my gas tank for 5 bucks...

Hear ye! Hear ye! If you can, get thee to Meijers before Saturday! Pick up a sales ad or two! It just may fill your gas tank! Right now, Meijers has a coupon in their sales ad for any new or transferred prescription you get filled in their pharmacy, get a 20$ custom coupon to be used on gas or groceries. Woot! Annie just had her *ahem* nine month check up *ahem* on Tuesday and it came fresh with a new script for vitamins...so off I goes to Meijer, coupon in hand, gas tank almost to E. With the wonderful insurance coverage here at the Oaks, my copay is only $5.00, so I slapped my 5 dollars in change down for the vitamins, got me a $20.00 coupon and went and filled my gas tank. I have another one (script and coupon) and am hoping to fill about 1/2 of the truck's tank next week :) for $5.00! So, if you have any prescriptions needing to be refilled or new ones and don't normally use Meijer pharmacy - give them a whirl. Just don't forget to pick up the ad. I don't know if the coupon will be out in next week's ad or not, but it is good until the end of March sometime.

Of course - while I was waiting for my script to be filled, I had some time to go browsing around. There were only 2 things that I needed, taters & red hot sauce - the rest were all perks.

Here we have pictured, along with adorable Miss Gracie Lou Who and my beautiful yellow roses from Valentine's Day that are starting to droop.... 5 lbs of taters, 1 bottle of red hot sauce, 1 bag of Quaker rice cakes snacks, 6 jars of baby food, 1 loaf of Aunt Millie's Healthy Goodness bread, 1 pack of Trident gum (just like my Grandma used to chew!) and 1 box of Crest Weekly Intensive paste <--which I'm interested to try out. Apparently there are 16 uses and it's just like the dentist's paste. Huh. Anyway - of course had a coupon for everything and my whopping total came to...are you ready?

.32 cents! That's right, baby.

Gum - free
Rice Cakes - free
Toothpaste - free
Taters - 2.00
6 jars of baby food - .40
Red Hot sauce - .49
Aunt Millie's Healthy Goodness Bread - .75

I had a 3.50 Meijer OYNO coupon and I thought I had it figured to where I was only going to have to pay .14, but I forgot to figure tax on the toothpaste (I always forget that!) - so another .18 cents added to my GRAND total.

Total on groceries for this week so far is 3.43. Not too shabby for a non pay week!

I tell ya, these prescription coupons that everyone has out right now, along with a generous supply of medical needs, and a smashingly low co-pay has produced some very much needed budget relief on the old girl. You should have seen what I did at Wags on Sunday...transferred a prescription from Rite Aid and got a $25.00 gift card. That, coupled with their baby sale produced the following:

3 packages of diapers
1 package of pull-ups
1 jumbo pack of wipie refills
1 small jar of formula
1 trial size baby oil
1 trial size baby wash
1 Advair inhalar
2 rolls of paper towels

Grand Total: 17.22 out of my pocket (5 for the script!) savings: 40.40.

Now for my last Rite Aid gift card to come in, I'll get some more cheap formula (I CAN'T WAIT TILL MARCH 25th!!! - NO MORE FORMULA --for a while at least! and no, I'm not pregnant)

So, my February budget is coming out MUCH better than my January budget for groceries. I even menu planned for a whole month just from my stockpile, so that perhaps next week will be a savings week too!

This turned out to be a much bigger post than I intended, but I just knew that stockpiling and paying attention to the deals would pay off and it seems that I'm getting there...