According to the "you saved" last night, it was well over $300 that I saved. Only looked at 1 circular, and only shopped at 1 store. Seems worth it to me.
QFT, if you are driving multiple places for pennies you are doing it wrong.
We have a major concentration of stores all around each other so it makes it easier, but we still tend to stick to 3 stores (Costco, Publix and something like a CVS or Sams if they have a special deal going).
I use CouponMom a lot, starting to test Ibotta and Checkout51.
I will do BOGO's with two store coupons and two manufacturer coupons quite often, It would be easy to say just one of those is $5-10 at times in savings alone. Then when they have I buy gift cards/gas cards at $40 for a $50 card (you are allowed one for every $50 you spend, I usually will stock up when the cards are available about every 2-4 weeks).
Costco Chicken is great (individual packs of 5 legs and 4 thighs) and only $1.27/lb.
This is a good read, it's the USDA food cost guidelines. The numbers in the tables are based on a family of 4, the adjustments are below:
http://www.cnpp.usda.gov/USDAFoodPlansCostofFood/reports
For singles add 20%
For families of 2 add 10%
For families of 3 add 5 %
For families 5-6 people deduct 5%
For families over 7 people deduct 10%
For my family (43 year old male, 42 year old female, 24 year old female, 16 year old male and a 12 year old male), I deduct 5% once I add everything up. This was based on September 2014's numbers. They update them once per month.
This is the monthly breakdown by food cost budget level:
Thrifty $823.08
Low-Cost $1091.27
Moderate $1364.11
Liberal $1662.03
I am trying to cut my costs down a bit as we are in the Liberal range. I want to add more non-meat proteins and the like to get it down closer to a moderate cost.
To get the break down of what food groups/portions make up the above plans:
(The direct links on the USDA website and in the food plan .pdfs are wrong the correct links are below)
Thifty:
http://www.cnpp.usda.gov/sites/default/files/usda_food_plans_cost_of_food/TFP2006Report.pdf
Low-Cost, Moderate, and Liberal Food Plans:
http://www.cnpp.usda.gov/sites/defa...ans_cost_of_food/FoodPlans2007AdminReport.pdf
These are from 2006 and 2007 and are still accurate as they only contain the breakdown of what food groups and portion sizes, not pricing. For pricing you'd use the monthly documents above.