Bountiful Baskets.......Good Deal or Not??

We first started participating in the Bountiful Basket foodco-op about a month ago.  What isBountiful Basket? Essentially it is an organization that provides fresh produceeach Saturday to its participants.  Thecatch is that you don’t get to choose what produce will be in your basket comeSaturday.  Generally it’s all good stuff.  Every once in a while you will get a randompiece of exotic fruit or some giant potato looking thing, but most of the timeit’s just the same stuff you would end up buying at the grocery store.  It is kind of nice that they don’t tell youwhat you’re getting, it gives you a variety of produce throughout the month andkeeps your meals interesting, although we do have A TON of celery in our fridgeright now from the past two weeks.

We pay $15 a week to participate.  At first I was skeptical, but after the firstweek and seeing how full our basket was, I became a little more excited aboutthe money we might be saving.  Each weekwe got our basket and I was consistently impressed, but I was still curious toknow the dollar value of our savings.

So this week I decided to compare what we got in our basketwith the prices of the same produce found at Walmart.

Here are my findings based on what we received this week.....

Not too bad! I think the savings of 36% definitely overshadows the downside of having uncertainty in what your basket will contain. 

Visit www.bountifulbaskets.org to begin participating.

Crap.......diapers are expensive!

I can't believe it's been nearly a month since this precious little girl entered our lives!

It's been an amazing month and she has brought so much joy into our lives.  Also, she has brought a lot of dirty diapers.  I had always heard that diapers were expensive, but wow...I was not prepared.  Neither for the price of the diapers or the shear quantity that would be needed.

Being the tight wad that I am, I set out to determine which brand was best.  My first study was on strictly price and these are the average, per diapers costs that I found.

Based on this graph, I was convinced that we needed to just purchase the generic Walmart or Target brands. Based on her using 7 diapers a day (seems like a lot, but we found it pretty normal so far), we would save $18.90 that month by going with the cheap brands in comparison to a Huggies.

So we bought a pack of the cheap kind and consequently realized there was definitely another criteria to be considered when purchasing diapers: quality.

You get what you pay for and when dealing with poop, it's just not worth going cheap!

We decided to go with Pampers and have found them to be very reliable and we are definitely willing to give up the extra money.  If you're willing to do a little extra legwork, you can generally find bulk pampers online for a pretty good deal, around .18 cents a diaper.