Reader Question: Powered Milk v. Fresh Milk Savings

Momstheword asks:"Do you use your powdered milk just in cooking or for drinking too? Recently I priced it and it wasn't much cheaper than regular milk."

Thanks for the question!

The answer? It depends.

We're not big milk consumers. I don't drink it at all or put it on cereal, but I cook with it. When I lived alone, I used powered because I could make it a cup at a time- no waste! Even a quart would go bad in my fridge in my single days.

I continued the powered tradition when I got married. The price gap was sizable in those days, so we were a powered milk home exclusively.

Now the gap is starting to close. I buy our powered milk at Aldi's for $5.99. One box makes two gallons (which lasts us quite awhile.) That would be $2.99 a gallon.

Let's price compare. Note: all of these prices are for skim milk:

Aldi's Powered Milk per gallon: $2.99

Aldi's store brand gallon: $2.97
Kroger store brand gallon: $3.39
Horizon Organic Milk gallon: $6.29
Walgreens brand gallon: $2.99 (sale price)

Aldi's store brand is cheapest by two cents. However, since we do not drink much milk, I still buy the powered. We make up small portions at a time. The exception is when I find organic milk at manager markdown prices. The half gallon pictured is .99 cents on manager markdown. I've gotten organic milk as cheap as .50 cents for a gallon on about to expire manager markdown. When organic prices beat the powdered milk price, I buy organic. Otherwise, we stick with powered.

Milk freezes well, but takes awhile to thaw. When I see organic milk at a good price, I stock up and fill my freezer. I pour out what we'll use into a pitcher and then refreeze the rest. We still have three gallons of organic milk in our chest freezer, so we're good on fresh milk for quite awhile! When that milk is gone, I have four boxes of powered milk waiting in our pantry.

Readers- how do you save money when buying milk?

Aldi's Tour

Hey, Aldi's has an Aldi's tour on their website! If you've never been to an Aldi's, this is a great place to start. If I had seen this site before my first visit, I would have brought a quarter and my own bags.

They also have a menu planner and recipe ideas for all their great deals.

Thanks for pointing that out, Thriving On One Income!

Watch those Markdown Specials!

I love manager markdowns and coupons! Keeping my eyes opened got me some primo deals at our local Dillons today. Everything you see here cost me $35.61.

Here's a few of my favorite deals:

After blogging about the cost of powdered milk going up, I snagged 6 half gallons for ten cents each. WOW. Five of them are hanging out in my freezer.

The two sour creams were five cents each.

The cheese was a Wal-Greens deal- .99 cents per 8 oz bag. I bought 12 of them using three separate orders.

The Puffs tissues were another Wal-Greens deal. I could not find the coupon that Crystal mentioned, but we are out of tissues so at seventy nice cents each, I bought nine boxes.

Two Tennessee Pride sausage rolls at Dillions- they were 4 dollars each originally. Currently, they are one sale buy one get one free, which brings them down to two dollars each. I had two one dollar off coupons, so I got them for a dollar each. Score!

The Salad kit was .99 cents, which will go well with tonight's lasagna and leftover rolls.

The half and half was five cents, which will go into tomorrow's potato soup and make our coffee even more delicious.

Tuna Deal at Super Target!

I just got twenty-two 6 oz cans of Starkist tuna for $2.03 with the magic of combining coupons and sales! Target is selling certain cans of Starkist tuna for .59 cents each. This week there is a .50 cents off online coupon that you can use, which (in my area) brings the price down of each can to .09 cents each. It's pretty hard to beat .09 cent tuna! Check and see if this deal is going on in your area. You can even print out the coupons at the kiosk in the store, but I usually do it at home since I print so many coupons. My husband somehow sets it up where we get several coupons per page and we use black and white ink when we print them out.

We use tuna in sandwiches, the occasional Tuna Helper meal, and one of my favorite soups for fall and winter, Tuna Cheddar Chowder. If you eat tuna and have a Super Target in your area, take advantage of this deal to build your pantry and help stretch your grocery dollars!

Deal Alert: FREE milk!

2 gallons of free milk at Kroger with the purchase of certain cold cereals! It worked at my Dillons in Wichita, KS. If you have coupons, more the better! Crystal explained the deal here better than I ever could. Remember- milk freezes well, so if you have a freezer and eat a lot of cold cereal, don't be afraid to stock up! There were coupons in the coupons inserts in the Sunday's Wichita Eagle. I'm sure there may be coupons for others as well.

WFMW: Grocery Flier Websites

I'm back from my East coast adventure, and it was a blast! The wedding was fabulous, my hotel with the kitchen worked out well (except the part where it caught on fire and I had to evacuate in the middle of the night, but no lasting damage done) and everything went as planned. My dress will be on e-bay later this week- beautiful, beautiful dress, and I hope it blesses the next person to own it.

For those of you who don't get grocery ads in the mail, there are a few websites out there that can help! Of course, there is The Grocery Game. If you work outside the home, or have very little time, this is an inexpensive way to be sure you're getting a good deal. I really wish I had known about it when I was working 50+ hours outside the home. It would have saved me a bundle!

For those of you who are more interested in free options, one of my favorites is Sunday Saver. It is a free website that posts the sale fliers for tons of stores. I love that this option posts sale fliers for more than just grocery stores, although it does do plenty of those! It is free, and you usually don't have to enter any information to use it, other than your zip code so the correct flier for your area will come up.

Another good one is My Grocery Deals. It is a bit more extensive than Sunday Saver. It is also free, but you must sign up to use it. One of my favorite features is that it includes the nutritional information of many products, so you can decide if you want it in your cart before you even get to the store! Definitely worth checking out.

Since I have not always gotten the paper or been in a place where the grocery store fliers came in the mail, these online fliers really work for me!

Pantry Easter 2007

Last year, I was very excited how inexpensive our Easter was, thanks to the stocked pantry. This year is more of the same. Here is my Easter Dinner shopping list:

• Ham (the roommate generously donated a grocery store gift card he won at work and told me to buy the fancy ham. Yum!)
• Strawberries (on sale B1G1 at Dillons this week.)
• Apples

Gotta love the pantry!

This year will be similar to last year, menu-wise. Every major holiday I decide that I'm going to do a NEW! DIFFERENT! MENU! But I always fall back on the old favorites. Maybe on Thanksgiving? I do tend to do the meats a different way each year, so that's a start.

Easter at Casa La Frugal

Ham

Green Bean Casserole

Fresh Baked Rolls

Roasted Potatoes

Cranberry Sauce (my husband requested it, and I happen to have some in the freezer!)

Strawberry Pie

Apple Pie

Coffee, Tea

Easter really snuck up on me this year. I want to do an Easter basket for my husband too. I don't really know why, but the idea has been planted in my head and it keeps coming up, so I suppose that there is a reason. I will do this as frugally as possible, and try to get candy he likes and I hate so I don't eat the whole thing before I give it to him!

Combine Those Coupons With Sales!

Here's another way to illustrate how using coupons and sales and store promotions can really help your grocery budget...

Dillons paid me .87 cents to walk out the door with these groceries!

This week there is a sale where if you buy ten of any number of items, you will get two dollars off your order. There was also a pharmacy coupon in the paper this week. Bring in the coupon and transfer a prescription or bring a new prescription to their pharmacy, you get 20 dollars worth of groceries. (It is put on your Dillons card and is automatically taken off at the register.) I had a prescription that I needed to transfer anyway, so I did that today. I also did the buy ten items/get 2 dollars off thing. I also had tons of pretty good coupons and there were several good sales this week.

(Click the picture to enlarge)

Unfortunately, the two dollars did not come off as it was supposed to. I pointed this out to the cashier, who said that she thought it did not come off because my total was so low after coupons. I stood firm and said that it did not come off before I ran my coupons, as it usually does, and she called a manager over. Since I had indeed bought ten items from the promotion items, and they could not figure out why it was not working, the manager just gave me two dollars in cash! I put 1.13 on my gift card. With the two dollars the manager gave me, they paid me .87 cents to come to their store today. WOO HOO!

Secrets to Supermarket Savings

Crystal Paine has finally put the finishing touches on her latest e-book, Secrets to Supermarket Savings: Tips and Strategies to Cut Your Grocery Bill by 40-75% or More. I was one of the lucky ones to get a copy before the final copy was finished, and I have to say that it is a wonderful book. When I started really getting serious about saving money on my grocery bill, I joined the Grocery Game. (See my sidebar for my reviews on the Grocery Game.) While I had success using the game, it pained me to pay for a service that I knew I could do myself. It was just overwhelming to try to do it by myself, not knowing where to start. Mrs. Paine has been saving on groceries and feeding her family well on next to nothing using the skills taught to her by her mother. Secrets to Supermarket Savings is an excellent guide on how to get those savings- without having to subscribe to a service to do it for you! Using her strategies, I have been able to drop my Grocery Game subscription and still buy groceries for next to nothing. As this week's cost breakdown mini-series shows, those savings really add up! For less than eight bucks for the book, Mrs. Paine clearly and concisely shows how anybody can enjoy getting groceries for less. If you have a copy already or choose to buy a copy, I would love to hear how much you saved using her strategies!

Groceries Under Twenty Bucks

Nineteen dollars and ninety-three cents, to be exact. Gotta love those manager's specials! (And Wal-Greens Easy Saver Rebates!)