Once we quit buying diapers and formula for our kids, we dropped Sams like a hot potato. Tell your wife to get into couponing while she has some free time, you can save a ton of $$ that way.
This....
We have 5 kids (one has finally moved out, but we still feed her occasionally) and we do a combination of couponing, Costco and Zaycon Foods for our groceries. We are finally out of the diaper stage for the most part (my youngest still wears pull-ups to bed), but we are able to stick to a $600 a month budget for food, cleaning products and paper goods (paper towels, toilet paper, etc). Some months we go over, but it's usually due to a stock-up buy like Zaycon Foods. We buy chicken breast in bulk from them, I bring it home, process it into gallon zip lock backs and freeze it. We also buy breaded chicken tenders from them that I use in a LOT of recipes. I'm a stay-at-home dad now and my wife works 30-35 hours a week. Our budget is laid out so that everything is accounted for and we go out to eat VERY infrequently - mostly just for birthdays and special occasions.
As far as couponing goes, disregard the couponing shows. While some of it is legit, for the most part they are trips that are planned out so long in advance that they are impractical. My wife coupons sensibly and we do have a decent size stockpile, but nothing like the "Extreme Couponers" that you see on the shows. We typically save 60-80% on our groceries and toiletries and often times have had trips where we spent less than a dollar for a several-item trip and often are even paid to shop (free items with money savings rolled to the next trip). Biggest thing to learn about couponing is that it's not really about the coupon itself, it's more like Scrabble where you combine the coupon with a sale priced item and sometimes another promotion. In Lexington, NC we don't have a Harris Teeter nearby (closest is Salisbury or Winston-Salem), so we don't get to participate a lot in the double couponing, but when they run Super Doubles or Triples, we usually figure out a trip or two to get stocked up on stuff. Check out
www.southernsavers.com for some couponing tips for whatever is local to you. We get a LOT of our stuff from CVS as they have their Extra Care Bucks promotions that we get a lot of stuff free from there. Best advice I have is to familiarize yourself with the coupon policies of each store you visit and be prepared to pull them out if the cashier calls you out on one. If you know their policy better than the cashier (and stay within the rules!), you can really get some deals that others will walk away from.
Other advice I have is to get at least one large chest freezer. In our outbuilding, we have a large chest freezer for meat, a large upright freezer for vegetables, and in the kitchen we have a standard size refrigerator/freezer plus a smaller refrigerator/ freezer for food storage. For the most part, the smaller fridge is for drinks and snacks for the kids, where the larger one is for meals for the week and general cooking stuff. Learning to cook the meals you enjoy is the best way to save money over going out to eat. You don't have to be a gourmet chef to be able to make stuff you'd get at a restaurant. I can now cook just about anything we would order in a family style restaurant, most Italian and Mexican places and I'm even learning Greek cooking. My kids don't like a lot of spicy stuff, but they enjoy most of what I make.
