6 Tricks to Loosen Up Your Grocery Budget

I promised I'd share some of my tips for my super cheap shopping trip.

We're totally gluten free (except for the cheesecake addiction) but even if you wanted to eat bread or crackers or whatever, you can adapt most of my meals into a "normal" meal.

I'll share my first 6 ideas with you today.

One thing that all of you mom's with chirruns (I know that's redundant, I just like saying chirruns) will understand the need for convenience foods, but if you're anything like me, you freak when you see the price and the ingredient list on most convenience foods.

So I made some of my own!

No more canned soups, preformed sausage patties or strangely un-appealing-yet-delicious lunchables.

Homemade veggie beef soup, sausage patties I made up and froze myself hten divided into packets, and black bean quesadillas. I've use all of these already and it's fantastic. The soup is as easy as dumping it in a pot or slow cooker. The sausage patties saved me nearly $4!! I made 23 patties from a $2 roll of sausage and the the little box of 24 premade patties was like $5.50!!! And they fry up perfectly. And the black bean quesadillas...I made 21 quesadillas for about $4 or $5. Just pop em int he toaster oven and dip in homemade salsa!

Now that my freezer is stocked (I only showed you half of my freezer meals..more to come later), let me show you how I stocked my fridge!

I made up quart size jars of salad. In the bottom of each jar is sliced red onion, shredded carrots, diced cucumber topped with romaine lettuce. One jar will feed all four of us enough to be full! We also have cheddar cheese, blue cheese and pickles to add if we want. For a total of 8 jars, I paid about $8 if you include the cheese and dressing.

I also bought fresh berries and divided them up into snack bags for the girls. I ended up with 10 bags and each bag is enough for both girls to eat a snack from. This is one of about 5 different snack options. Each pack of berries was about $4, so I paid $8 for 10 snacks. That's a little pricey when you compare it to something like crackers or fruit gummies, but it's worth it to spend a little in this area!

We love our sandwiches, but with no gluten and no time to make homemade gluten free bread, I made up these grab bags for lunch. Each bag has some sliced ham, sliced pepperoni and cubed cheese (enough for a whole lunch for the family). When I serve it, we have corn chips and salsa, pickles, a side salad and I either make little roll ups or meat-n-cheese kabobs.

I'd say this probably cost me around $12 because the meat was expensive (I wish I could get it cheaper, but we don't have good grocery stores here) and I think there were 9 bags. If you count the chips and pickles and such, I'd say I spent a total of $15 for 9 meals.

So there you have it, the first few tricks I used to save money and prepare for the month of meals.

One of my biggest resources in SAM's club. I know it can be a major rip off, so you have to be super careful, check your prices and ONLY get what's on your list.

A great buy is a 5lb block of cheese. We go through tons of cheese around here. At walmart, one pound is $4.28. So for 5 lbs I'd pay$21.40. At SAM's, a get a 5lb block for $13.47. Almost $8 back in my budget, y'all! I also buy my chicken there because it's a dollar cheaper per pound and it's not as gross as walmart's. I'd love to get organic chicken, but let's be honest, we too broke fo dat, yo.

So what do you think? Can you use any of these tricks?