I did good!

So today I went out on my first official day of using coupons. Fry's is now doubling and tripling coupons until Dec 2 and honoring other stores coupons. So after church (yes, I said church..Daryl and I found a wonderful church called Palm Valley with an amazing pastor and children's daycare...more on that another day). So we ended up buying 3 newspapers and spent over an hour clipping and matching them up so we could have 3 coupons of each thinking that a lot of things would be free because they were $1 off of each. I also had a $10 off Albertson's, $6 off fresh and easy, $5 off Bashas's and $10% off total from Safeway. I, of course, had 3 of each of those and she said they would only honor one of each and as far as tripling coupons goes...you can only do that up to a dollar for each (which I didn't know, so that was a bummer). One thing I did do which was nice was pre-load my Fry's card with buy one get one free deals. I also had a buy 1 herbal essence product and get one free (not to mention a $2 off of 2 on that). I also got a free Cover Girl mascara with $1 off on the other one. One thing I didn't like at Fry's is I noticed a lot of things were priced much higher than at Walmart. For example, I needed Pine Sol and for the smallest bottle at Fry's, it cost around $5 (plus no coupon). Also, peanut butter and a few other staples were pretty expensive (even with the coupons). So when I was done, I ended up saving 51%! I saved $174 and spent $164!! Honestly, about half were non food items which was pathetic because of prices and the coupons I had. I still had to go to Walmart later on to buy a few more things that I didn't want to buy at Fry's (like the economy size Pine Sol for around $6). Daryl stayed home with the kids and I'm so glad I did this alone. It was pretty crazy, but it feels good to save (even though the lady behind me kept sighing loudly every time the cashier had to get a manager to approve a few coupons). I'm sure it will get easier as I get used to it. Daryl asked what was for dinner looking at all the cleaning products I had yet to put away and I had to laugh and tell him windex lol. No, really I still got enough food for meals and stuff, but yes, I did buy way too many cleaning products :)).