A double batch of Baked Oatmeal, coconut oil from Amazon, & I changed my mind on Fetch Rewards

I’m currently challenging myself to stick with a $70 grocery budget for our family of five. This includes almost all of our breakfasts, lunches, snacks, and dinners + most household products (toiletries, laundry soap, etc.).

For live updates, be sure to follow my Instagram Stories. See all posts on my $70 Grocery Budget here.

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If you’ve been around here for awhile, you know how much we love Baked Oatmeal. My kids would eat it for breakfast every single day! And Jesse loves it, too.

So I made another double-batch of it this week — hoping that it would last more than a few days! Well, I think I may have to start quadrupling this recipe at the rate these people can eat it! 🙂

So many of you have asked how you serve Baked Oatmeal. We just scoop it out of the pan into bowls and top it with milk — like cereal. It’s too crumbly to eat like bars but it’s a different consistency than granola or oatmeal.

I guess you’ll just have to try it out to see what I mean, if you’re curious! 🙂

You can dress it up by mixing into different flavors — such as nuts or fruit or dried fruit or chocolate chips. My family loves it plain, but I’d love to hear if you have a fun way to serve it!

I’ve also gotten a lot of questions about what kind of oats to use. Honestly, you can use any kind of oats you’d like — rolled oats, old-fashioned oats, gluten-free oats, quick oats. They all work!

My favorite are rolled oats or old-fashioned oats, but I promise you that any kind of oats will work! So just use what you have!

To see how easy it is to make a double batch of Baked Oatmeal, watch my video above. (And you can subscribe to my YouTube channel here if you’re interested in watching other shopping haul videos, recipe videos, and more money-saving videos!)

I also bought coconut oil this week since we were out. Only, I totally didn’t get a great deal on it. For some reason, I was messed up on my ounces and was thinking this was going to be a tub twice the size of this one.

So I spent $8.49 for this small tub. But oh well! Live and learn — it’s much less expensive to buy coconut oil from Walmart or Aldi or even just the grocery store. (Anyone have a great source for really inexpensive coconut oil that is high quality? I’d love to know!)

I bought these specifically because I want to make these Coconut Oil Fat Bombs. Have you tried them before?

By the way, I use my Swagbucks credit to earn free Amazon gift cards to use toward purchases like this. It’s pretty easy to earn at least $20 to $25 in free Amazon gift cards every month, just by doing simple activities every day.

You don’t need to refer anyone to earn this amount. However, if you have friends who would be interested in earning free gift cards from Swagbucks gift, be sure to use your referral link to invite them so you can earn even more!

That said, even though I did use free Amazon gift cards to purchase this coconut oil, I’m still subtracting the amount I “paid” from my $70 Grocery Budget total. The reason is that I want to keep this as relatable and doable as possible for you all.

I don’t want anyone to feel frustrated that I can stick with a low grocery budget, but the reason I can is because I’m a blogger and get more referral credit to companies as a result. ?

I Changed My Mind About Fetch Rewards

One of my readers recommended that I sign up for Fetch Rewards and a few days ago I said I didn’t like it as much as I like Ibotta. (I also sporadically use Checkout 51… though I find that it’s harder to earn $$ on Checkout 51 just because I don’t buy many things that they have offers for.)

Well, some of you piped in and gave me some great tips on how to use it better. I discovered that you can scan every single one of your receipts and, even if there’s not a participating offer on the receipt, you’ll still get at least 200 or so bonus points (that’s about $0.20). It looks like you can literally scan any receipt — or at least any receipt for groceries!

Plus, if you purchase any participating brand, you’ll get points. I thought you had to purchase a certain amount of products for the points to count. But nope, the points count regardless!

The other thing I love about Fetch Rewards is that you just scan your receipt. You don’t have to scan any barcodes from products.

And if you use coupons, they don’t count those off your point total! Plus, when you scan your receipt, they automatically detect whatever products you purchased that qualified. It’s a lot quicker than Ibotta or Checkout51!

So my advice is to go ahead and sign up for it and start scanning your receipts. Even if you only earn a few dollars per month, that’s still something!

I’ll continue to test it out and keep you posted! I’m hopeful that I can earn enough from it to “buy” a $5 to $10 Amazon gift card each month that I can use to buy more groceries and stretch my grocery budget a little bit more!

Have you signed up for Fetch Rewards yet? If not, you can sign up here and use code WW7XJ and you’ll get a bonus 2,000 points (worth $2).

This Week’s Totals So Far

Total spent so far this week: $37.44

Total left to spend: $32.56

Rebates: $0.25 for submitting a receipt to Ibotta

(I also did a big Kroger shopping trip today — I hope to post about that trip tomorrow. But here are the totals as of Thursday.)