Awesome Wife

My wife is totally awesome. That's a true, honest-to-goodness fact. I'm sitting here entering receipts into Quicken to track our spending, and I've just entered three receipts for groceries from the local Ralph's grocery store. Ralph's does double coupons, and my wife has been coupon clipping for years now (indeed, it's the only reason we get the local paper). Anyway, she's gotten really good at it. For example, the last three shopping trips she went on look like:

10/30/07:
-- Total Purchased: $123.48
-- Total Discounts: $55.45
-- Total Out-of-Pocket: $68.03
-- Percentage Reduced Cost: 44.9%

11/05/07:
-- Total Purchased: $148.92
-- Total Discounts: $78.60
-- Total Out-of-Pocket: $70.32
-- Percentage Reduced Cost: 52.8%

11/13/07:
-- Total Purchased: $81.29
-- Total Discounts: $34.78
-- Total Out-of-Pocket: $46.51
-- Percentage Reduced Cost: 42.8%

Can you believe that she regularly cuts our grocery bill nearly in half?! And to top it off, she does a lot of shopping at Costco, for even more savings, and doesn't buy hardly anything else unless she's got a coupon or there's a good deal somewhere. My wife is just awesome, what can I say?

(Now, for those of you who don't live in Southern California and are thinking the grocery budget reflected above is high, you'd be right -- but that's life in Southern California. I think that if we lived in Utah with the bulk of our extended family, my very awesome wife would probably be able to get all our groceries for the week for a buck and a quarter.)