Toward the end of March, my sister and I took a coupon class with The Crazy Coupon Chick, and I was really impressed with what I had learned. In fact, I was so impressed that I actually took notes, and one of those notes was to challenge myself to save even more money when grocery shopping by going through store ads and coupons and then meal planning.

If you've been following the blog for a while, you know that I am a big advocate of meal planning. It is not only a huge sanity saver, but it has been a really helpful tool to help curb our spending. However, I am a person that meal plans based on recipes that pique my interest, and I had never considered going through the store flyers and planning my meals based on the sales. 

When I attended the coupon class, I had already meal planned through April 23, and I didn't really want to change anything. so I just kept an eye out for deals on the ingredients I would need. This past weekend was the first time I looked at the store flyers and coupons first (and of course The Crazy Coupon Chick website) and then meal planned according to what was on sale. It's a little more difficult to meal plan more than one week at a time, but I think once I have a little more experience, I'll be back to my old meal planning self and saving my family even more money!