Buying in Bulk to Save Money on Meat

You know there’s one thing my husband and I can’t help but enjoy: a good steak.  Don’t go all PETA crazy on me, but we do like eating meat.  We actually don’t have steak very often but when we do we like to have a good one.

In the past we have tried many things to cut back on how much money we spend buying meat:

  • We have always bought when on sale.  When we lived in Pennsylvania the grocery store we shopped used to have meat on sale buy one get one free often and that’s when I would stock up.  My current grocery store doesn’t have the same type of sales so we have tried other options.
  • Two years ago we tried buying in bulk.  We bought a quarter of a cow and that meat lasted us a whole year.  The problem, I found, was that most of the meat was ground meat and the steak selection was not very good.  Also, later we found out that the person we bought from lied to us and the meat was not in fact hormone-free.  We have not been able to find another trusted source so we have not explored this avenue again.
  • I have tried using coupons.  Thanks to coupon trades and the generosity of friends I have been able to use winetags to save on meat purchases.  I have also taken advantage of Mail in Rebates.

However, my access to winetags has been more difficult as I engage in less trading.  It was time to try something different.  In the past many people have raved about the quality of the meat at Costco.  My husband and I decided to give this a try.  Initially we looked at buying already cut NY strips steaks for $6.99 a pound.  That was until we walked a few feet over and we found a slab of NY steaks on sale for $4.69/lb.  So check out what we did:

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We bought around 11 lbs for $51.45.  We did lose maybe a pound of it after we trimmed the fat.  But we would have done the same with the steaks since they also needed trimming.  We vacuum sealed different portions of about 1 lb each.  This should last us for possibly a year.  Like I said we don’t eat it that often.  To put it in perspective, before buying this meat I told my husband I would love to hit Fogo de Chao.  That place is amazing and expensive! We spend around $120 for both of us when we have been there and that’s only because we don’t drink any wine or other alcoholic drinks.  While buying this meat was not cheap, it will probably keep us away from this or any other steakhouse for a while.  So what we spent on ten steak meals is paid back with the cost of a meal for one at a steakhouse.