Online retail coupons

It was not too long ago that I never used coupons. Now I’m a giddy couponing fool. For the most part my coupon use has been confined to grocery stores and drugstores (which I wrote about here and here). I do use coupons for Bed Bath & Beyond and occasionally for Kohl’s, but that’s mostly because they just show up in our mailbox and I don’t actually have to do anything to get them. Also, despite having expiration dates printed on them, Bed Bath & Beyond coupons don’t expire so I just put them in a drawer and grab them when I’m heading over to the store.

This weekend, Mark and I decided to buy some new clothes for Charlie. In theory the weather around here will start getting cooler soon (although you’d scarcely know it by the never-ending summer we’re having) and Charlie has outgrown most of his pants and long sleeve shirts from last season. We decided go to Old Navy to see what they had to offer in Charlie’s size. Inspired by a recent Kohl’s trip where I saved a ton of money on clothes using a coupon they’d sent in the mail, I did a quick Internet search for “Old Navy coupons” and found several options. The first was $10 off a purchase of $50 or more that I found here. The second was for 30% off a single item that I discovered here at retailmenot.com. I printed both and off we went. Old Navy had great options for clothes for Charlie and we ended up with about 7 or 8 items. The two coupons I printed couldn’t be used in the same transaction, so I took one of our more expensive items and bought it with the 30% off coupon, and Mark bought all the other items with the $10 off coupon. We ended up spending $56 and saved $14.50.

In addition to retailmenot.com, there are lots of different sites that offer printable retail coupons as well as discount promotions that you can use when ordering online. Here are just a few I found recently (as well one site I just happen to be aware of since I know the guy who runs the site): ultimatecoupons.com, couponclock.com, myretailcodes.com, and fatwallet.com.

Do you have any recommendations for how to get retail coupons? If so, do tell!

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The contest: We’re finished!

The All You grocery challenge ended this past weekend. As you probably remember, the challenge for contestants was to spend just $25 per family member per week on groceries for a total of four weeks. The winner will be given a $1000 grocery gift card. Since we’re a family of three, we had just $75 per week to spend over the past four weeks (you can read about our experiences with weeks one through three here, here, and here). This past week, the fourth week, we spent $73.93.

The next step for the contest is to fill out their “exit form” and submit it for my chance to win the grocery gift card. The exit form actually asks some interesting questions, so I thought I’d share with you my answers (some of which I’ve expanded further for this post). Even if you don’t wish to subject yourself or your family to a strict weekly food budget, maybe you’ll find some of what I’ve learned over the past four weeks useful for your shopping. So here are the All You exit form questions along with my answers:

Question 1: How much money did you spend each week?

Week 1: $71.58

Week 2: $71.71

Week 3: $73.89

Week 4: $73.93

Question 2: What creative strategies did you use to save money?

1) I shopped at different grocery stores based on what was on sale at each. I regularly check this site called Madame Deals where, from the home page, you can click on the icon of your favorite grocery store and/or drugstore and they will show you all of the items on sale at that store for that week (there are lots of other websites like this if Madame Deals doesn’t follow the sales of a grocery chain near you). They even tell you when a sale item can be combined with a coupon either from a recent newspaper insert or from an online source (and they provide a corresponding link to the online source). Last week I checked out Madame Deals for Kroger sales. Kroger is a grocery store in my area but I don’t normally shop there (another chain, Harris Teeter, is more conveniently located for me). I thought it might be worthwhile just to see what Kroger had on sale. Well, Kroger was having a fantastic sale on a bunch of items we normally buy so I made a shopping list based on their sale items, gathered my corresponding coupons, and went over to Kroger and instantly joined their frequent buyer program. I saved a ton of money on groceries during that trip (my receipt said I saved a total of 55% off the regular, retail price). In addition to checking weekly sales at large chain grocery stores, I also subscribed to an email newsletter from our local co-op. Each week they send me a list of their sale items. They also recently sent me an invitation to take a 15 minute online survey for which they gave me a coupon for 10% off my entire purchase of items at their store.

2) I shopped for some groceries at drugstores. Buy watching for sale items at drugstores, I discovered that I could sometimes get food items there for less money than what I’d pay at the grocery store — snack items and cereal are often less expensive at the drugstore, especially if I use the drugstore’s rewards program combined with manufacturers’ coupons. I also used CVS ExtraCare Bucks and Walgreens Register Rewards that I earned through toiletry purchases to buy groceries for very little money.

3) As much as possible, I prepared dishes based on items we had on hand, making substitutions in recipes when necessary. Allrecipes.com has a great tool at the top of their home page that allows you to search for recipes based on ingredients you already have (it even lets you input ingredients you DON’T want included in the recipe search). Allyou.com (the sponsors of this grocery contest) have a convenient list of recipe ingredient substitutions. For example, if you’re out of half-and-half, they tell you how to use milk plus unsalted butter instead.

4) I used a lot of manufacturers’ coupons and tried to maximize my coupon savings by combining coupons with store sales as well as using coupons at the grocery stores that offer to double the face value of each coupon.

5) I made some dishes in bulk so that I could bring them to work for lunch during the week. The first two weeks of the contest I made huge pots of soup and the second two weeks of the contest I made hummus using an inexpensive package of dried garbanzo beans.

6) I froze some leftovers instead of putting them in the refrigerator. Freezing leftovers means that when I don’t feel like cooking and there isn’t much to eat in the fridge, I have a meal ready to go in the freezer. Freezing leftovers also means that I don’t have to have the same meal more than one day in a row – I can space out when I eat the meals so as not to grow tired of them.

Question 3: What healthy strategies did you use?

1) I gave a lot of consideration to when it was worth the extra money to buy organic foods versus when I could save money by not purchasing organic. When we started this contest, my friend Trish asked if having a limited food budget meant, for example, “no organic milk.” Well, the answer is sort of. Using organic milk as an example, I bought organic milk the weeks it was on sale and didn’t the weeks it wasn’t. The sale price of organic milk was still always more than the regular price of non-organic milk. However, spending a little bit more on organic milk (on sale) was worth it to me, especially when I knew I could save money on other food items that didn’t matter as much to me whether they were organic (like cereal).

2) We ate less meat than usual and more vegetables, beans, and whole grains. This was a natural switch since we had pre-paid for our CSA vegetables and we had 11 pounds of whole wheat fusilli pasta on hand before the contest began.

3) A hard-boiled egg (or two) made for an inexpensive, protein-rich snack at work.

4) Water substituted for a lot of other beverages.

Question 4: What did you learn from this challenge?

1) We can eat for $75 a week which is quite a bit less than what I had become accustomed to spending at the grocery store.

2) Having a well-stocked pantry is essential to staying within a weekly food budget. When we ran out of common pantry items and had little money left in the weekly food budget, it felt disheartening.

3) The occasional splurge on a really coveted food item makes it a lot easier, psychologically, to eat inexpensively at other times (it’s sort of like dieting in that way).

4) In order to be really successful at staying within a food budget all members of the family have to be supportive of the budget. (Uh, have I thanked you for the past four weeks yet, Mark?)

5) For us, it makes more sense to make several smaller trips to the grocery store during the week than to do one large shopping trip per week. When we try to do one big shop, we tend to overestimate how much food we’ll need for the week. If we make smaller trips every 2-3 days, we only buy what we know we will want to eat over the next couple of days.

6) In order to take full advantage of sales, it may be easier for us to keep a monthly food budget rather than a weekly food budget. Having a weekly budget isn’t as conducive to “stockpiling” items as is a monthly budget. So, for example, if cheese is heavily on sale at the grocery store, on a monthly food budget I’d be inclined to use the sale to my advantage by buying enough cheese to get us through the month (or until cheese is on sale again). On a weekly budget however, I may not have enough money to buy several packages of cheese and still buy the other groceries I need for the week. This realization about implementing a monthly budget rather than a weekly one is probably the most useful thing I learned by doing this contest.

7) I don’t think I’ll put this one on my All You exit form, but something else I learned by participating in this contest is that sometimes it’s better for family harmony to ignore the budget. I’d like to say that Mark and I just sailed right through the four weeks of this contest. We didn’t. By having a firm $75 weekly limit on our spending, we felt at times like we were really constrained. We had some tense moments regarding decisions about food purchases and, frankly, it’s pretty toxic to a relationship to argue about how to spend a few dollars.

So that’s it. Do you have any good tips to pass along to keep grocery bills in check? Are any of you inclined to try spending just $25 per week per person on groceries? Do tell.

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The contest continues

Saturday ended the third week of the four-week grocery contest sponsored by All You. As you may remember, the challenge is to spend just $25 per person per week in groceries for those in your household, all for a chance to win a $1000 grocery gift card. Weeks one and two passed by without too much trouble and I even figured out some tips to help keep our grocery bills down. This third week we spent $73.89, which is basically in line with the $71.58 and $71.71 we spent in the first two weeks. However, this week seemed a lot tougher to stay in our budget. In fact, due to a last-minute impulsive snack purchase, we actually went over our limit. As soon as I realized it, Mark was kind enough to take the snack back to the store thus bringing us back down below the $75 limit. But considering that the snack was frozen mango chunks, a healthy treat that Charlie adores, it felt somehow wrong to be returning it to the store just to make sure we were below the imposed $75. If we hadn’t already had a package of unopened mango in the freezer, I probably would have just quit the contest then and there.

I’ve been thinking about why this week was so much more difficult than the previous two.

1. Toward the end of the week we ran out of some basic stock items like rice and butter which then limited even more what we could make at home for meals.

2. The veggies in our CSA box were uncharacteristically few this past week. We’ve really come to rely on incorporating those vegetables into meals throughout the week and we just didn’t have as many to use so we had to purchase more vegetables.

3. I felt tired. With less food in the house I had to be even more creative about what meals I prepared which left me, well, let’s just say uninspired to cook (and a little bit hungry).

Fortunately, this week is going a bit better than last and, even more fortunately, the week is almost over which means that the contest is almost over. I’ve learned some good tips to lower our grocery bill, but I’m looking forward to not keeping quite such a careful eye on our food budget.

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Can you believe we’re still in this contest?

Yes, we’re still in the running to win the $1000 grocery gift card courtesy of the All You contest. As you may recall, the grocery challenge is to spend just $25 per person in the household per week (that means $75 a week for our family of three) for four consecutive weeks. Week two ended on Saturday and we spent a grand total of $71.71 on groceries.

There were several things I did this week to keep the grocery bill down. In addition to the tricks I used during week one of the contest, I added a few more this past week:

1. I took full advantage of coupons. Harris Teeter, our local grocery store, was doubling their coupons up to $1.99 (they normally double coupons, but only up to $.99). So I culled through my coupons for all the ones offering between $1 and $1.99 off of products knowing those coupons would yield especially big savings this past week (between $2 and $3.99, to be precise). Then I based meals around items I could get for good prices based on my high value coupons. And, it paid off (pun definitely intended). In all, I was able to save over $18 just using manufacturers’ coupons. Several times I was able to combine these coupons with Harris Teeter specials for some really good deals (I even got two items completely free).

2. I bought groceries at the drugstore. I had $6.50 in “Register Rewards” from a recent trip to Walgreens where I purchased some toiletries (Register Rewards work like Extra Care Bucks at CVS — they essentially represent store credit for purchasing certain items). I used the Register Rewards to buy some snack items. Snacks represent a pretty decent percentage of our weekly food purchases, so the more I can save on them the better. I even picked some snacks that were on sale for extra savings. All told, I bought two big containers of ice cream and a large bag of tortilla chips that, after using the Register Rewards, cost me only $1.74.

3. I let the traditional July 4th holiday cuisine work to my benefit. Who doesn’t like hot dogs on July 4th, right? We don’t typically eat hot dogs but I’ve found that every so often they taste really good. They’re also really inexpensive. I actually bought the highest quality hot dog sold at the grocery store — organic, all beef — with good quality hot dog buns, and each hot dog was still less than $1. Another cool thing about hot dogs: Charlie will occasionally eat them. That’s a pretty big deal since our picky eater almost never eats meat. I paired the hot dogs with some homemade cole slaw made with CSA veggies and some chips with salsa (the tortilla chips were the ones from the Walgreens visit). So not only did we save some money by celebrating July 4th in traditional culinary fashion, we also had a pretty good meal.

4. Just as I did last week, I made a huge pot of soup at the beginning of the week and brought bowls of it to work each day for lunch. Although unlike last week I didn’t use CSA veggies, I did choose the soup based on items I had on hand or were on sale at the grocery store. I made carrot ginger soup which tasted equally yummy hot or cold (making it extra convenient to bring to work). My recipe was based on the one found here.

Carrot Ginger Soup
Makes about 6 generous servings
Adapted from the recipe for Simple Carrot Ginger Soup found on Whippedtheblog

• 1 lb carrots (I used a small bag of the mini carrots)
• 1 yellow onion, diced
• 1 Yukon gold potato, cubed
• 2 tablespoons ginger, peeled and minced
• 2-3 cloves of garlic, minced
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 6 cups chicken or vegetable broth
• salt and pepper, to taste

Directions

In a saucepan, place the potatoes, carrots, and broth and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer. Meanwhile, heat the olive oil in a large pot over medium heat. Add the onions and ginger and saute until onions are translucent (about 5 minutes). Add the garlic and saute another minute. Pour the potato, carrots, and broth mixture into the large pot with the onions, ginger, and garlic. Simmer until potatoes and carrots are very tender, about 20 additional minutes. Remove from heat and puree the soup until smooth using an immersion blender, food processor, or upright blender.

The tally for the soup:

carrots: $1.50
yellow onion, potato, garlic, ginger: $1.00 (this is just a guess since I essentially bought each of these items in bulk and the potato was part of our CSA box)
chicken broth: $1.17 (I made the broth; you can find the recipe and my calculations for the cost here)
olive oil, salt, and pepper: $.50 (again, this is a guess and a pretty generous one since I doubt they were really this expensive)

Grand total: $4.70
Cost per serving: $.78

When I ate this soup at work, I usually brought a hard boiled egg, a piece of fruit, and some yogurt to go with it which all made for some inexpensive, yet tasty, eats.

We’re in good shape to remain in this contest for the third week. We’ve spent about $50 in groceries this week so far which leaves us $25 for the rest of the week. No problem (I think; I might be getting cocky).

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Sometimes you have to know when and where to spend the money

Over six months ago Mark and I started our new budget, and it’s been harder than I’d hoped to live within it. We had some unexpected, and therefore unbudgeted, expenses and we’ve cheated a fair amount on our $150 a week kitty money. But, on a positive note, everything we’ve charged with our credit cards we have immediately paid off.

I’ve found that the biggest obstacle to living within our budget is that, other than going broke at the end of the month, we don’t have a huge incentive to save money. Don’t get me wrong, not going broke is a pretty big incentive in and of itself, but it’s a fear-based incentive rather than a reward incentive. When we created our budget in January, we didn’t budget for anything fun — no trips, no big purchases, nothing — because after looking closely at our finances, we felt like it would be financially irresponsible to include these things in our budget. Consequently, sometimes it feels like we’re trying hard to save money without a little carrot at the end of the stick to keep us going.

Early last week Mark suggested that we go to a baseball game — Charlie’s first. Ordinarily, I would have flinched thinking of the cost, but we had some unseasonably cool weather (which for North Carolina means that the weather was tolerable as opposed to hideous). I knew that if we didn’t go then, we wouldn’t go all summer. So I agreed and Mark went out with Charlie and bought the tickets for a game a couple of nights later. I didn’t ask Mark how much the tickets cost, and when we got to the ballpark we spent a fair amount on food, drinks, and some over-priced games for Charlie. The truth is, I didn’t want to know how much it all cost. I just wanted to have a good time and create some memories. I felt like we needed it.

So the biggest lesson I’ve learned over the past six months of living with our budget is that we need to revise the budget to accommodate fun activities, including a vacation. These things don’t have to be hugely expensive, but they need to exist in order to make budget living a lot more palatable.

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You can’t count us out yet

This past weekend marked the end of the first of four weeks of the All You grocery contest. As you may recall, the gist of the contest is that you spend $25 per family member per week on groceries for a chance to win a $1000 grocery card.

So how did we do? Drumroll, please: we spent $71.58. For those of you not speedy with math, that makes us $3.42 under our limit.

Here’s how we stayed within our $75 budget:

1. We made several small trips to the grocery store during the week rather than one big shop meant to last the whole week. We only bought the food we knew we wanted to eat over the next couple of days and limited ourselves to those purchases. Typically, I like to do one big shop but it turns out that we’re then prone to some strange hoarding mentality and we often over-shop. By spreading out our shopping over several trips to the grocery store, we actually reduced the amount of food we bought. We were also able to visit two different grocery stores, buying the items we knew to be cheaper at each store.

2. I tried to prepare meals based on items we already had. Needless to say, we had lots of fusilli. On another night we had some bean burritos because, other than a jar of salsa, we had everything on hand. I also specifically shopped for sales, creating other meals based on items that were on sale.

3. Our pre-paid CSA veggies took center stage. I let kale and carrots star in a big pot of soup. I brought the soup and a hard-boiled egg to work for lunch several days in a row. We ate our CSA kohlrabi in different ways. I brought whole cucumbers to work to snack on. By stretching the CSA veggies, we bought very few other vegetables or fruits.

4. We went hungry. Ok, I’m kidding. Sort of. Mark would probably tell you that he had less to eat this past week than usual, but he always gets slightly annoyed when I mess with the quantity or variety of his food.

Though we stayed within our $75 budget, we could have done better. I don’t like grocery shopping with Charlie because we end up buying more snack foods when he says he wants them and we don’t pay as much attention to the sales. Last week, for instance, Harris Teeter offered rainbow trout on sale for $3.99 per pound. I asked Mark to go get some. He took Charlie and went off to buy the fish (he even specified to the guy behind the counter that he wanted the trout that was on sale). When he got home though, I noticed that the trout was priced at $9.99 per pound. I went online to the Harris Teeter weekly specials website and saw that the $3.99 sale was for whole trout whereas we bought the fillets. Fortunately for us, this wasn’t an expensive mistake since two fillets were only just over half a pound. But I certainly wouldn’t have asked Mark to buy the trout had I known it was going to be $9.99 a pound. That said, I used the fillets to try out this very yummy and inexpensive recipe for Asian trout that we paired with roasted beets and kohlrabi from the pre-paid CSA veggies.

Now week two of the contest is firmly underway. We’ve spent about $55 so far this week. We’ll make at least one more trip to the grocery store in the next few days, but it will be for smaller items like apples and bananas since we’ve already bought all the food we need for our main meals. We should have no problem sailing through to week three of the contest. I know Mark is thrilled.

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I might be in a little over my head

Several weeks ago I signed up for a contest for a chance to win a $1000 grocery card. Here’s how it works: for four weeks, you spend $25 per week per person in your household for groceries. At the end of the contest, you submit your grocery receipts and you’re judged on how creative and healthy you managed to be with your enforced budget. I sort of forgot I entered until I got an email from the contest sponsors reminding me that the contest begins today. These are the rules (sorry, I’m sure you’ll be disappointed to learn it’s too late for you to sign up).

To participate in the contest, the three of us can spend a maximum of $75 a week in groceries. To put this challenge in perspective, it is very easy for us to spend about $125 a week in groceries. I’ve been trying to spend less money at the grocery store for the past six months, but it’s been hard. It’s helped that I’ve started clipping coupons and paying more attention to sales, but we’ve never come close to $75 a week for groceries.

It turns out that $25 a week per person comes to $1.19 a meal (assuming three meals a day and no between meal snacks, which is a pretty big assumption). And to put that in perspective, $1.19 is less money than I spend on a cup of coffee at work. Well, shoot. Am I doomed to fail? Is it wrong to feel really hungry just at the thought of participating in this contest?

So how about you? Do you know how much money you spend on groceries per week? Do you think you could spend just $25? If so, please tell me how!

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Learning to be coupon-smart, Part 2

I’ve recently started to clip coupons in an effort to save money on our groceries and toiletries. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about tricks I’d gathered from other bloggers about how to be coupon savvy. Since then, I’ve learned a few more tips to maximize savings through coupons.

As a recap, here are the tips from the first post (where each is explained in detail):

• Coupon stack
• Give up brand loyalty
• Shop for bargains, not items
• Shop at multiple stores
• Make multiple purchases at the same store

Here are some more tips that I’ve recently learned, followed by their full explanation:

• Let others do the work for you
• Shop when other people don’t
  
• Shop the same store at the same time each week

A. Let others do the work for you. I’ve been getting coupons from the Sunday paper for several weeks now. I have amassed a lot of coupons and it’s hard for me to keep them straight (serious couponers have sophisticated sorting systems, but I’m not yet sophisticated — in many ways!). But it turns out that I don’t really have to be so organized because there are lots and lots of people who blog about coupon savings (for example, see here, here, and here). These people are the really serious couponers, and they do the work for me. They write posts each week about the best deals at the major drugstores and grocery stores. So, for example, CVS drugstore changes their weekly deals beginning on Sundays. By Friday or Saturday of each week, the serious coupon bloggers have learned what items CVS will be offering for sale for the coming week, and have posted about the best deals — the ways to stack coupons by combining manufacturers’ coupons with items on sale or items that offer ExtraCare Bucks. These bloggers detail the source of the coupon to use to get the deal, and if available, they’ll even link to a coupon you can print online. Here’s a small example of a CVS deal for this week as posted on Frugal Coupon Living:

Old Spice or Gillette Body Wash – 10 to 18 oz $4 (get $4 ECBs) Limit 2
B1G1 Gillette or Old Spice P&G 5/2
= $4 MONEYMAKER wyb 2 with B1G1 coupon

Here’s what the above deal means in non-experienced-couponers’ language: CVS has Old Spice and Gillette Body Wash on sale for $4. If you buy one of these, you’ll get $4 ExtraCare Bucks (ECBs) back; but you’re limited to purchasing two body washes. The next line details the coupon to use: a buy-one-get-one-free (B1G1) coupon on Gillette or Old Spice from the Proctor & Gamble (P&G) coupon insert from the May 2nd Sunday paper. The third line details the savings: you’ll essentially be up $4 (MONEYMAKER) when you buy (wyb) two with the buy-one-get-one-free (B1G1) coupon. (Frankly, even if you don’t have a B1G1 coupon, this is still a good deal — buy a body wash for $4 and get back $4 ECBs to use on another purchase).

Now that I know about these serious coupon bloggers, I search their sites for the biggest store deals each week. These are deals for things that I can get for free (or close to it) or for items that will pay me back (the “moneymakers” like the Gillette deal above).

On Saturday night, I reviewed the CVS deals posted by the bloggers and went looking for the corresponding coupons I had. Luckily for me, I had the Old Spice/Gillette Body Wash coupon. While we don’t normally use body wash, if it is free or if CVS is essentially going to pay me to buy it, then I’ll buy the body wash, water it down, and use it as hand soap (or I could always donate toiletries to a local homeless shelter). In my online search for CVS deals, I found that I also had another coupon for cereal that I could use in conjunction with a sale at CVS. Finally, I wrote down a list of the deals I was going to get at CVS the next morning so that I wouldn’t get confused once I got there.

Here’s the step-by-step of what I did yesterday at CVS so you can get a sense of how I maximized some deals:

1. Scanned my ExtraCare card when I entered the store. I received 5 coupons which, although I didn’t use them yesterday, I’ve put aside for another time.
2. Bought two Gillette Body Washes using my B1G1 coupon. The retail price for each was $4.99; CVS was offering the body wash on sale for $4 and offering $4 in ExtraCare Bucks for each. The cashier rang up the items and the pre-tax total came to $8. I gave her my B1G1 coupon which, it turned out, was based on the retail price ($4.99) rather than the $4 sale price. So $4.99 was taken off my bill, making my pre-tax total $3.01. The cashier gave me my receipt which had my $8 in ECBs coupon at the bottom.
3. I went shopping for several items. First, I picked up some dental floss that was selling for $1.99 with $2 back in ECBs. Second, I had a coupon for $2.50 off $12 worth of CVS brand items, so I picked up the following:

• 2 CVS pantiliners on sale from 2 for $1.49 to 2 for $.99
• 1 package of CVS wet wipes (which, by the way, are the best wet wipes around) for $4.99 (on sale from $6.99)
• 2 bars of CVS bar soap (knock-off of Cetaphil bar soap) for $3.79 each

I took my items to the cashier and the total came to $15.55. Then I handed the cashier the $2.50 coupon as well as the $8 ECBs I earned from the Gillette body wash. The final pre-tax total was $5.05. But, the dental floss gave me an additional $2 ECBs.
4. Then I completed a third transaction. Kellogg’s cereal was on sale from $4.49 to $1.66 a box. I had a coupon for $1 off 2 boxes of Kellogg’s cereal, which brought my pre-tax total down to $2.32 for both boxes of cereal. I then gave the cashier my $2 ECBs I had just earned from the dental floss, so I ended up paying $.32 for the cereal (before tax). (I hadn’t gone in to CVS knowing about the dental floss deal; I just found it while I was there. Had I known about the deal, I would have bought the dental floss with the Gillette body wash, received my $10 ECBs in one transaction, and then just bought the rest of my items in a second transaction rather than having to complete three transactions.)

Here are the items that earned me money: 

I paid $5 for these three items and earned $10 in ECBs

My $10 in ECBs (plus CVS sales and my two additional coupons) got me these seven items for $3.38:

Had I bought all of these items at their original retail price, I would have paid $35.02. Instead, my entire visit to CVS cost me $8.38 plus tax (which represents a 76% savings).

In addition to the weekly deals that coupon bloggers post, CVS also does the work for me to find special deals. Their weekly flier, which is included in the Sunday paper, not only lists their sale items for the week, but also lists which of their sale items have corresponding coupons in that Sunday’s paper. For these items, there’s a little black icon next to the sale item in the flier which depicts a pair of scissors and says “coupons in Sunday’s paper.” Couldn’t be simpler.

I’ve been consulting the coupon bloggers for weekly CVS deals for several weeks now, but I only just realized that there are also coupon bloggers who post the best coupon deals for my local grocery store. I found them yesterday by googling, “Harris Teeter coupon 5/19” (Harris Teeter changes their weekly specials on Wednesday of each week, so I knew the latest deals began on May 19th). Google returned several hits of coupon blog posts for current Harris Teeter deals (like this and this; if you’re near a Harris Teeter, both of these sites show some items you can get for free along with a link to printable coupons for those items). To find deals at the stores where you normally shop, just do a similar Google search for bloggers writing about those stores. I’ve routinely seen posts about weekly specials at Target, Rite-Aid, and Walgreens, just to name a few.

B. Shop when other people don’t. As a novice coupon user, at times I get confused by deals, especially when I’m trying to stack store coupons with manufacturer coupons. Store salespeople are very knowledgeable about coupons and, in my experience, are happy to help clear up confusion. I shop at odd times rather than during busy periods so that if I have a question or if I want to make multiple purchase transactions during a single visit, they will help me and not get annoyed.

C. Shop the same store at the same time each week. This tip goes hand-in-hand with shopping when other people don’t. I try to go to CVS first thing Sunday mornings. I’ve been doing this for several weeks now. I started going on Sunday mornings because it was convenient for me and I knew the store wouldn’t be crowded. An unexpected benefit of shopping on the same day and time each week is that the same salesperson is always working. She now knows me and we’ve developed a friendly relationship. She knows I’m trying to save money with coupons and has started pointing out deals to me or offering tips on how best to maximize the coupons issued by CVS. Frankly, who better to offer tips about the CVS deals than the cashiers? They see people successfully saving money all the time. Also, cashiers have the ability to override the register; that is, if a coupon doesn’t scan properly, the cashier has the ability to enter the discount manually. This happened to me twice yesterday and both times the cashier pleasantly gave me the discount herself. Though I’m sure she would have done this for any customer, she seemed particularly nice about it because we now have this friendly relationship. I, in turn, helped her out because she was trying to train a new cashier and needed someone to act as a “guinea pig” customer. I was more than happy to oblige because I got to hear her explain coupon stacking to the cashier trainee, which was certainly beneficial to me.

So that’s it for my newest tips on how to be coupon-smart. But what about you — are any of you experienced coupon users? Are any of you just starting out like me? Or, do some of you completely hate coupons (in which case, thanks for reading this crazy long blog post — you must really be Yikes Money fans!)?

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Learning to be coupon-smart

Many years ago I routinely clipped coupons, but over time I found that I wasn’t really saving any money. Instead, I fell into a trap wherein I’d buy an item just because I had a coupon for it. Sometimes I’d buy things I wouldn’t ordinarily purchase and didn’t really need. Other times I’d buy something I needed, like toilet paper, but would buy the name brand I had the coupon for even if the store brand without a coupon was less expensive.

With our new budget, however, I’m particularly interested in saving money on our groceries and toiletries. So I’ve been looking for tips online about how to maximize the use of coupons. Here’s what I’ve learned:

1. Coupon stack. Coupon stacking refers to using manufacturers’ coupons in conjunction with store discounts. When coupons are released by manufacturers, stores often follow suit by discounting the same item. Experienced couponers don’t use their valuable manufacturers’ coupons without additional discounts from the store. Manufacturers’ coupons are usually good for about 4-6 weeks. Grocery stores and drug stores offer discounts on items for one week and will rotate their discounts about every six weeks. If you have a coupon for an item that isn’t currently on sale at the store, wait to use your manufacturers’ coupon until it is on sale.
2. Give up brand loyalty. If Colgate toothpaste is on sale and you have a coupon for it but you normally use Crest, well, buy Colgate. This makes sense to me, of course, but there are some products I’m not willing to give up because I love them. Below I detail how I broke this rule during my recent trip to CVS (although I still managed to get a pretty good deal).
3. Shop for bargains, not items. By reviewing the coupons you have in conjunction with store discounts, choose to purchase items because they’re bargains, not necessarily because you need them at the moment. This is a tough idea for me because we are trying to live on a weekly budget. Why would I buy toilet paper this week if I don’t currently need it? The answer is because for items that will necessarily be needed and used at some point – like toilet paper – buy it when there is a bargain and stock up.
4. Shop at multiple stores. To get the best bargains, it may be necessary to shop at multiple stores. For me, I do this sparingly because I just don’t have the time to drive to several different stores to do my shopping. That being said, I do routinely go to the grocery store for food items and the drugstore for toiletries in the course of a week. Also, I sometimes will go to our big chain grocery store followed by a trip to Trader Joe’s a few days later. I could easily plan better to save more by shopping for specific sale items at the different stores.
5. Make multiple purchases at the same store. I address this money-saving technique below as I recount my recent trip to CVS pharmacy.

Putting My Coupons in Action

Using the tips above, I decided to see whether I could score some good deals using coupons. Mark bought a Sunday paper for $2.00 just so we could get the coupon inserts (I think if you’re really savvy, you could get the inserts for free by going to your local library and ask for them from one of the several Sunday papers they get). The Sunday paper also had the CVS flyer that lists the in-store sale items for the week.

CVS offers a free discount program called “Extra Care” which works in the same manner as grocery store customer discount cards. My Extra Care card hangs on my key chain and the teller scans it when I pay for my items. CVS only offers discounts to Extra Care members. CVS also offers Extra Care Bucks (called by experienced couponers “ECBs”) to members. ECBs can be used on anything in the store. An example of an ECB deal might be something like this: buy Dove liquid soap on sale from $4 to $3 and earn $1 ECB. That means that a shopper will pay $3 for the soap and the receipt will show an additional coupon for $1 Extra Care Buck to be used on the next purchase.

With the Sunday newspaper coupon inserts and the CVS flyer laid out on the dining room table, I followed rule #3 above and looked for bargains. First up, I reviewed the CVS flyer for items I knew we could use (either now or in the near future). Then I leafed through the coupon inserts to see if there were any matching coupons for those items. When I found those coupons, I cut them out.

At CVS stores there is a special red machine which scans items for a price check. If you scan your Extra Care card, it will automatically generate coupons for you. You can scan your card more than once; the machine will tell you when you’ve reached your coupon limit. I’d never noticed the machine when shopping at CVS before, but I learned about it while doing my “smart couponing” research. At our local CVS, the red scanning machine is located just to the side of the front registers.

So here is the play-by-play of my recent shopping trip to CVS.

From a previous trip to CVS, I had two coupons:

• $2.50 off CVS brand items worth $12 or more
• $1 Extra Care Buck

On the way into the store, I scanned my Extra Care card twice at the red scanner machine and got the following five coupons:

• $2 off 2 bars of soap
• $2 off $10 worth of CVS cosmetics
• Buy 2 Hershey’s candy bars, get 1 free
• $1 off 2 CVS brand Earth Essentials Cleaning products
• $2.50 off CVS brand items worth $12 or more

Some of these coupons weren’t relevant to what I wanted to buy that day (and might never buy – I doubt I’ll use the CVS cosmetics coupon or the one for Hershey’s candy bars).

I went to the soap aisle and put the following things in my cart which we routinely use and were either out of or close to it:

CVS was offering a special: buy $20 of CVS brand facial cleansing/moisturizing products, get $5 ECBs.

I went to the register with my items and here’s how the cost broke down:

• 2 bars of soap: $3.79 each
• Liquid cleanser: $8.49
• Moisturizing cream: $10.49

Total without tax: $26.56

Then I used three of the CVS coupons I mentioned above: $1.00 ECB, and the two coupons for $2.50 off CVS brand items worth $12 or more. I tried to use the coupon I had for $2 off 2 bars of soap, but the teller’s scanning machine rejected it (I guess I’d used my coupon limit; I can use that coupon another time).

Total without tax using the coupons: $20.56 (19% savings)

As an aside, the products above are the CVS version of Cetaphil products. I started using Cetaphil products over 15 years ago and I love them. They’re very gentle (the liquid soap is especially good as a body wash for babies and a facial cleanser for people with sensitive skin). As an extra aside, I’m actually not a big fan of antibacterial soaps which these bar soaps are, but CVS was out of the non-antibacterial-Cetaphil-knock-off bar soap. Anyhow, the CVS versions of the Cetaphil products are just as good and about 2/3 the price. But, I broke coupon rule #2 above – don’t be loyal to a particular brand. Had I been willing to purchase any soap and moisturizer, I would have saved a lot more money.

The bottom of my receipt from this transaction had my $5 ECB coupon for spending over $20 in CVS products, so following rule #6 — make multiple purchase transactions at the same store –I tore off my $5 coupon and went shopping for a few more items at CVS. It was time to put rule #1 — coupon stack — to work.

Here’s what I bought:

I had manufacturers’ coupons from the Sunday paper for all of these items and CVS was offering additional discounts on all of them. Here’s the breakdown:

• Oil of Olay facial moisturizer: $8.99 original price, $2.00 off using CVS discount, and $2.00 off using manufacturer’s coupon. Final cost: $4.99 (44% savings)
• Nivea shower gel: $6.00 original price, $1.11 off using CVS discount, and $4.00 off using manufacturer’s coupon. Final cost: $0.88 (85% savings)
• Tampax tampons: $3.79 original price, $0.82 off using CVS discount, and $1.00 off using manufacturer’s coupon. Final cost: $1.97 (48% savings)
• Always pads: $3.79 original price, $0.82 off using CVS discount, and $1.00 off using manufacturer’s coupon. Final cost: $1.97 (48% savings)

Subtotal: $9.81

Then I gave the teller my $5 ECBs coupon that I had earned in my first transaction.

Final total (without tax): $4.81.

Had I bought all of these items at their original price, the total would have been $22.57. This represents a 79% savings.

Now, truth be told, I don’t normally buy shower gel (we routinely use the bar soaps and liquid soap I bought in the first transaction instead). But, we’re out of liquid hand soap. Since I got the Nivea shower gel for just $0.88, this is substantially cheaper than buying the same amount of liquid hand soap. I’ll just refill our old hand soap dispensers with the Nivea shower gel instead.

Here’s the final cost-savings tally of my trip to CVS:

Total (before tax) on all merchandise before using coupons and CVS Extra Care discounts: $49.13

Total (before tax) on all merchandise after using coupons and CVS Extra Care discounts: $25.37

Total savings: $23.76 (48% savings)

While I’m very happy with this result, I should tell you that this amount of savings is nothing compared to what experienced couponers can save. There are some people who are so sophisticated at this that they can walk out of stores paying next to nothing for a large amount of items. Oh well, there’s a learning curve to being coupon-smart, and I’m definitely still learning.

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Maybe, just maybe

About nine months ago, Mark and I refinanced our mortgage.  We did it to lock in a lower interest rate in an effort to save some money.  It was a grueling, horrendous process culminating in the sale of our souls to the devil.  A month later, the devil sold our mortgage to another company, a company I had never heard of before.  A couple of months after that, the second company sold our mortgage to another no-name company.  All along, we just kept paying the mortgage each month to whomever the current mortgage-holder claimed to be and kind of crossed our fingers.  There have been some hiccups along the way, but no huge blunders.

Fast forward: this week has been challenging.  The least of our problems is that we ran out of kitty money; we can’t even see the kitty money from where we ran. The money we spent this past week is laughing at our kitty money budget.  Our much larger and more emotionally charged problem is finding a new preschool for Charlie because it turns out that not everyone thinks our energetic bundle of joy is such an asset to have in the classroom.  It’s been tough.  Two nights ago, I realized that I didn’t have a couple of the ingredients I needed for dinner, so Mark volunteered to go to the grocery store and while he was there, I sent him a text message that read, “Get some alcohol.  We need it.”  And, we did.  I figured, if we’d already blown the kitty money, we might as well buy some alcohol to temporarily forget about the kitty money and everything else.  Yup, I’m just that twisted.

Last night, however, I came home from work to a letter from our mortgage company.  Enclosed was a check.  A big check.  A check for $807.09.  The mortgage company is paying us, not the other way around.  There was an accompanying brief note that said, “The enclosed check represents the overage from your escrow account.  This amount was disclosed on your recent escrow analysis statement.” There are two things that concern me about this.  First, we never got a “recent escrow analysis statement.”  Nope.  Definitely not.  Second, and even more concerning, our property taxes went up this past fall by A LOT.  In fact, I had been expecting to get a letter from the mortgage company at some point saying, “By the way, you know that obscene amount of money you give us each month?  Not enough.”  So, I have every reason to believe that there has been some kind of mistake, but the mortgage company’s office isn’t open until 8:30 Monday morning to sort everything out.  So, until then, I’m choosing to believe there is no mistake.  No, sir.  That money is ours, and I’m going to spend the next 48 hours fantasizing about what we’re going to do with it.  Maybe I’ll start by repaying our kitty.

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