Late Birthday celebration and bacon

James' birthday was yesterday, but we were too busy to do anything. Tonight we went into town and "celebrated". James is a member of the Red Robin eClub, and he received an email for a free gourmet burger. I traded in some points on mypoints.com for a $10 Red Robin gift card a little while ago in preparation for our visit. The total OOP for our visit = ZERO. (When we set our challenge, I decided not to include tips in the budget. I like to reward good service so I pay the tip out of my allowance.) Savings = $18.38

After dinner we went to Culver's, of which James is also a member of their eClub, for his free frozen custard sundae. Total OOP = $2.59 for my custard, savings of $2.59

We also stopped by CostCo and got some bacon. We love bacon and are specific about the brands we like. Unfortunately we are willing to pay more for what we like. OOP = $11.89 for four pounds.

Rebate

I received a $9.85 rebate. I added that in to our challenge.

CVS trip

Quick trip to CVS today. Let me again express that I don't play the CVS game like everyone else. I refuse to buy stuff I'm not going to use just to get ECBs. Thus, I don't always save as much money as others, but I feel comfortable with my purchases. Today's purchases were done in two transactions.

Transaction 1:
1 Schick Hydro razor on sale for $8.97 - $5 MQ = $3.97
1 Schick Hydro shaving cream for $3.99 - Free MQ peelie on razor box = Free

Total before sales and Q = $12.98
Total sales and Q = $9.01
Total OOP w/ tax = $4.30. Earned $4 ECB

** Plus I'll send in my receipt to the Schick rebate and get a check for $8.97. **

Transaction 2:
3 Garnier Fructic shampoos on sale for $5 - 2 $1 MQ - $4.99 ECB (U Kotex) - $4 ECB (Schick)

Total before sales and Q = $22.57
Total sales and Q = $18.56
Total OOP w/ tax = $4.21. Earned $5 ECB

Meal plan 8/9-8/15

We have a birthday this week...specifically my James is turning 40 today! Unfortantely we are too busy today to do anything, so we'll celebrate tomorrow.

Monday - chicken/black bean wraps

Tuesday - Celebrating J's birthday (more to come)

Wednesday - lentil tacos

Thursday - beef fajitas

Friday - tuna steaks and potatoes

Saturday - BBQ chicken, potatoes, and corn

Sunday - Pink pasta

Finally a grocery trip!

We finally made it to the store last night for some groceries. There are a few preservative laden, fast foods in there, but it just had to be done. I also got a raincheck for some fruit bars that were part of a meal deal at HEB, but they were out of stock.

Total before sales and Q = $68.22
Total sales = $5.71
Total Q = $12.58
Total OOP = $49.93

Fiesta Texas FREE visit

On our recent "vacation" to house/dog sit for my parents we visited Six Flags Fiesta Texas. James is pictured above outside Tony Hawk's Big Spin, an awesome roller coaster ride! We paid ZERO dollars for our $50-60 tickets. How did we do it? Very easy the My Coke Rewards program.

I have been collecting reward points from boxes of soda or bottle tops for over a year. The great part is that we didn't pay for more than 90% of these points. My wonderful Mom collects all her bottle tops and saves them for me. Plus I get a bunch of box codes from both of my jobs. I've "earned" over 5000 points in a year.

Six Flags tickets were 1000 points each, so a total of 2000 points for us. I just redeemed the points and printed my tickets off the computer. Sweet!!!!!

I've also redeemed points for Powerade and magazine subscriptions. It is a pretty cool program and it probably takes me fewer than 10 minutes a week to type in my codes. Not a bad trade off of my time.

**This post is my opinion. Fiesta Texas and Mycokerewards did not compensate or contact me. **

I'm back

I just spent the last week house/dog sitting for my parents while they went on vacation. Thankfully James was able to take the time off as well so we got to spend a lot of time together...finally! On vacations our food comes out of our vacation budget, but my parents gave us $100 for groceries for the week. Are you kidding me? That's a month to two month's budget for us. I'd like to say that we spent only a little of it and saved the rest, but that would be a big fat lie. We bought some stuff to eat at the house and then used the rest to eat out at several restaurants. We definitely enjoyed ourselves!!!

As for the food situation in the house, it is pretty dire. I don't know when I'll have time to get to the store, but hopefully it will be soon.