No Rest for the Weary

Day 18

Exhaustion with this project is settling in.

After spending so much time clipping and organizing last night, I didn’t really want to plan a big shopping trip. I hadn’t even bought a newspaper this week, so the only circulars I had were the ones that arrived in the mail. Specifically one from the pharmacy. So I decided to meticulously plan a small shopping trip.

Here is what I did:

1. I went through the circular one item at a time with a marker.

2. I would take an item from the circular and then go to my coupon organizer and see if I had a coupon for that item.

3. If I had a coupon for that item, I would circle it and remove the coupon from my file. If I did not have a coupon, I would put an X on the item in the circular with the marker.

4. When I made it to the end of the items on sale, I had a circular with “X’s” and “O’s” and a stack of coupons pertaining to the items on sale.

5. Then I analyzed the sales with the coupons. If the discount constituted 60% or more, I kept the coupon. If not, I put the coupons back in my file. At this point, I realized that at the pharmacy today, I will buy 3 items.

It took 45 minutes to plan a trip with 3 items. It took 15 minutes to complete the shopping trip. One hour.

Granted, I bought a candy bar (which came out free) and 2 bottles of dish liquid (0.74 and 0.24 respectively). I saved $1.74. So one hour of work came out to $1.74. I’m not particularly dancing about my work to savings ratio here….

But on a brighter note, I realized that my shopping trip was much quicker than my non-planned and semi-planned trips. Also, as I went through the circular that I was becoming more efficient at spotting the deals and deciding which ones were “worth it” and which ones I should pass on. I really started to pick out +60% savings opportunities more easily as I went along. So I am exercising my brain and doing some pretty effective on the spot math. I think my grammar school math teacher- who had a really hard time teaching me percentages- would be SO proud.

Don't laugh- a lot of planning went into this!

...a LOT of planning.

 

SAVINGS TO DATE: - $ 257.24   (previous total 1.74 saved off retail)

 TIME SPENT TODAY: - 1 Hours (15 minutes shopping and 45 minutes planning).