What Works for me Wednesday!

I was recently asked what would be ONE time saving and money saving tip for other moms. A big letter A came straight to mind. I didn't hesitate at all in answering.....ALDI! One thing that I started doing a while back was making a monthly meal plan. I'm giving away a huge secret here, but I find most of my meal ideas and recipes from this site: http://familyfun.go.com/recipes/meal-planner/index.html/. So now that I have a monthly idea of what we are going to eat, I sit down one evening and go through the pantry/freezer, etc and write out my grocery list. Then on a Saturday I go to Aldi and get whats on my list. Ta-da....usually two carts full, tons of stuff and meals for the whole month without having to run to the store 2-3 times a week. There is NOTHING worse than dragging 2 toddler boys to a grocery store every day of the week to get something for dinner. I refuse to do it! Doing this saves a ton of money too. Anyone with kids (or not) knows that you can't run into Super Walmart and just get bread and milk. Come on now..... Its impossible!

Enough ranting about spending money on everything but what you need..back to Aldi. I am SUPER impressed with this store. I can get everything on my monthly list (minus a few things that I'm a snob about like toilet paper and paper towels) and usually spend less than $150. This is for a whole month folks! I'm not kidding! Aldi has a neat concept. You put a quater in the cart to unlock the cart and to get your quater back, you simply put the cart back in the corral when you are done with it. I'm assuming this is to save money from hiring cart jockeys (or high school boys to go and retreive carts in the parking lot). You also have to bring your own bags or you can buy the Aldi bags for about .10 cents. Needless to say, I have a ton of Aldi bags but I stopped using bags altogether on my "going green" resolution and put some totes in the back of the van and fill them up when I go shopping. The food from Aldi has always been very good and in some cases better than name brand stuff. However, Aldi does offer some name brand stuff. The prices are just crazy cheap. I can't stress enough what a wonderful money saver this store is. In a day when gas prices are above $4 (they are $4.09 here) you need to look around at where you can spend less and I hope that you check out Aldi. Here is their site: http://www.aldifoods.com/index_ENU_HTML.htm

SHOP SMART & SAVE!