Costco and Quicken

As we have been settling into our new home that has also come with setting a new budget and familiarizing ourselves with the area and our shopping options. We have been here on the island for about a month and after analyzing all our grocery reciepts, taking a tour of Sam's club, Costco, and Walmart. Joe and I decided that Costco could fulfill our needs at a better rate than the local grocery could (as long as we controlled our buying). It is easy to walk around and fill a cart with your hearts desires(ice cream, chocolate, pickles, top my list)but break you at the check-out. How do you remedy this? Make a list of what you need, decide if it is an item you will use in a timely manner if bought in bulk, and then ask will you spend more buying it at a grocery store in smaller installations in the amount of time it would take to use up the same item bought from costco? For example: We bought a box of 140 Glad ForceFlex Kictchen trash bags for about $11, our hope is we never have to buy trash bags again while living here. The grocery store carries the same bags in boxes of 34 for $7.99.
But also to help control our spending at Costco we signed up for Quicken, which is a banking solutions system that combines all your accounts and helps you categorize and track your spening, it will tell you how much you have left in each budget category. I know personally I use to log onto my online bank account and say "where did it all go?" Quicken will even give you spending predictions with a 10-day outlook. And if you are really couragous you can look at a graph of your spending! The best part of this is it is FREE, it isn't advertised on their home page but if you go to their products and services tab at the top, you too can have their free online product. We have enjoyed having it, mostly because it allows us to be good steward of the money we have!