TWDTWC 07/10/2011

Welcome, dear reader, to the first installment of This Week's Deals This Week's Coupons.  Only one of this week's drugstore freebies involves a coupon from this week's paper.  The rest are free without coupons, or are free after an internet printable coupon.

CVS:

Balance Bar $1.69, get $1.69 ECB, limit 1 ~~ no coupon required

Complete multipurpose solution, 12 oz, $7.99, get $7.99 ECB, limit 1 ~~no coupon required

The ad also states that the magic coupon machine will spit out a $3 off $10 worth of pain relievers coupon.  There are some pain relievers on sale, and I would highly recommend having a look in that aisle to see if there are any peelie coupons on the products that might score you a great deal.

They're also doing the $10 gas card when you buy $30 worth of qualifying stuff, but none of the qualifying stuff is free and much of it isn't really a good deal.

Rite Aid:

Crest Pro-Health Enamel Shield Toothpaste, 4.2 oz, $2.69, submit for $2.69 SCR, limit 1 ~~no coupon required (though if you have last week's P&G, you can make this a money maker)

Compound W Freeze Off or Warmer Freezing Wart Remover, $10.99, submit for $10.00 SCR, limit 1 ~~$1 off IP HERE or $2 off IP HERE

Noxzema disposable razors, 3 to 4 count, $2 ~~$2 coupon from this week's RP

Walgreens:

GUM 2 pack micro or super tip toothbrushes, or floss 200 yards, $2, get $2 RR ~~no coupon required

Hyland's teething gel, 0.5 oz, $5, get $5 RR ~~no coupon required but you can print this $2 IP HERE and make it a money maker.

W Women's 6 blade razor system, $3.99, get $3.99 RR ~~no coupon required

Happy saving!

Let the reader beware

Disclaimer:

I post deals based on the coupons available to me in my local paper (Raleigh, NC's News and Observer) and the ads available in my area.  There are regional differences in both coupons and sales.  My local CVS and your local CVS may both have a sale on soda, but mine may be Pepsi and your's may be Coke.  My local CVS may have a sale on toothpaste for $2.77, and your local CVS may have the same toothpaste on sale for $2.99.  My Sunday insert may have a coupon for 50 cents off that toothpaste, your's may have 75 cents off, or $1 off 2, or no coupon for the toothpaste at all.  Check your local inserts and ads to verify you can get the same deals I can before you go shopping.

Where to begin? Right here!

My cousin and I swap coupons and deal information.  It seems that almost every Sunday I get a phone call or a Facebook message about this weeks coupons and deals.  I don't mind at all.  First, I really like her so an opportunity to chat is never unwelcome.  Second, talking deals is one of my favorite things to do.

I've been posting to Facebook about playing the drugstore game, and about the deals I get for a while now on my own page.  I think it was a comment by one of her friends on one of her posts that reminded me just how overwhelming it can be to start couponing.

So that got me thinking.  I remember being a new couponer, bemoaning the sea of deals I could not do.  Sure, there are deal match ups to view online, but what if you don't have 6 months worth of coupons to draw from?  There are lots of places online that do the deal matching for you, but how many focus on this week's deals with this week's coupons?  None that I know of.

I can do that.

I am pleased to announce a new feature, effective immediately.

This week's deals, this week's coupons.
Every week I will match up the current week's coupons with the current week's drugstore deals, and post what are, in my opinion, the best deals.  I will post the money makers and freebies I find, and any other really good deals using the coupons immediately available at the end of your driveway or at the local corner store.

There is no better motivation when you start on your personal road to savings than a little success.

Baby frugal - feeding for less

Let's look at baby formula.  My baby drinks Enfamil.  The doctor gave us a sample of the Newborn formulation, the manufacturer sent us a sample of the Newborn formulation.  He didn't like the Similac, so Enfamil Newborn it is.

A quick cost comparison of the different ways it is available, powder, ready to feed and concentrate, reveals, almost every time, that buying the powder is the least expensive way, per ounce of prepared formula, to buy it.

The powder comes in 3 sizes.  A small coffee can size, a larger reuseable plastic tub in the 22-24 oz range (depending on the formulation), and refill packs for the large tub which contain 2 pouches.  Oddly, the refill pouches are not the same size as the insert that comes in a new tub.  They are substantially smaller.

If you take the cost of the container and divide by the number of prepared ounces it should make, you will get your unit cost.  Everytime I do this, the new refillable tub is less expensive than the refill inserts and the small can.

My baby is almost 8 months old, and he is still drinking the Newborn formulation.  Newborn advertises that it is for babies up to 3 months old.  When he got to about that age, and I was looking to buy formula, I picked up a container of the regular Infant formulation and compared them side by side.

The reuseable tub of Newborn purports to make approximately 170 oz.  The Infant formulation of the same size and price makes about 167 oz.  That's close enough to the same to not be pursuasive one way or the other on its own.

Then I looked at the nutrition information.  The Newborn and Infant formulations offer identical amounts of calories, protein, fat and all nutrients except vitamin D.  The Newborn formula has more vitamin D than the Infant.

So, the Newborn has more vitamin D and makes 3 more ounces than the Infant formulation.

The last 2 nails in this particular coffin were finding a tearpad of coupons for the Newborn, and only the Newborn, reuseable tubs in my pediatricians office, and at my husband's insistance asking my pediatrician.  He didn't appear to have given the matter any thought, but when I told him the nutritional difference between them, and that I could get the Newborn cheaper (courtesy of the coupon) than the Infant, he gave me the go ahead to keep feeding Newborn formula.  He also mumbled something about marketing gimmics.

I found those coupons in January, and they didn't expire until June.  They still had more every time we went back in for a check up, and every time I grabbed more to keep the savings rolling on in.

On top of that, I watched the sales.  Grocery stores and supercenters, oddly, aren't usually the best places to buy formula, not if you watch the sales and not if you buy a couple weeks worth of formula at a time when it is on sale somewhere.  The drugstores, CVS, Walgreens and Rite Aid, have had some great sales on formula regularly enough that if you keep 2-3 weeks worth of formula on hand you can coast to the next good sale most of the time.

Most stores sell the refillable tub in the $25 to $28 range, as an everyday price.  At least twice a month, I've been finding it on sale for $20 to $23.  I get really excited when it goes on sale at Rite Aid or CVS.  At Rite Aid, I was working on "earning" my 1000 points so I could earn the 20% discount off the everyday price.  Courtesy of a lot of sales on baby items, I hit the Gold discount, and I get 20% off everyday.  At the most expensive Rite Aid in town, my baby's formula, after my discount, is under $22 everyday.  At CVS, my baby purchases count towards my quarterly ECB rewards.  It's not much, 2% of your spending rounded down, but 2% is better than 0%, and that's what the grocery store offers.

What about buying online?  I checked in to that.  The best prices I could find online were as high or higher than the sale prices I was paying locally, and I couldn't use my manufacturer's coupons to bring that down like I can at the store.  Some places offer free shipping, others don't.  I could not find a deal online that could beat what I was paying right down the street.  You may.

Rite Aid trips 5/7/2011

Have I mentioned how much I love Rite Aid?

I went to 3 different Rite Aids today, did 5 separate transactions, and walked away with a bunch of stuff.

Rite Aid has Pampers on sale through today for $9.99, with a $2 +UP reward on each, limit 4.  There was a $1.50 off Pampers coupon in last Sunday's paper, of which I had 4.  My personal limit on the price of diapers is that I refuse to pay more than $5.  Since the little guy came home, I haven't paid more than $5 for a pack of diapers.  Some weeks you can't find diapers for that little, but that's why I have a small stockpile.  I try to keep a month's supply of diapers on hand at all times.  My supply has been dwindling, having not found any spectacular deals for a few weeks now.

I love Rite Aid and their surveys.  Almost every receipt I have gotten for at least a month now has had a survey code on it.  Complete the survey online, print a $3 off $15 purchase coupon.  $9.99 Pampers is most of that, so by stacking $3 off $15 coupons with the Pampers deal, I could score, and score pretty well, today.

4 of my 5 transactions had a single pack of Pampers, and enough other stuff that I had coupons for or that were otherwise good deals to get me up to $15.

Today I came home with:
4 jumbo packs of Pampers
2 bottles of Scope (at a friend's request, I didn't have a coupon, but they were on sale)
2 tubes of Crest toothpaste
2 quart bottles of Similac Ready To Feed
2 boxes, 10 count each, of Breathe Right strips
4 tubes of Desitin that I had a rain check for from MONTHS ago, the rain check gods smiled upon me today

In total, I paid Rite Aid $17.69 more, in cash and +UP rewards, than they gave me back in +UP rewards.  If we assume everything else was free, then I paid $4.43 a pack for Pampers.  $4.43 is higher than I'd like, but still below my maximum acceptable price for diapers.

Super Doubles 4/27/2011 and 4/28/2011

Some weeks, there's just not anything that catches my attention.  Since my last post about Rite Aid, I haven't been particularly inspired by the local grocery deals or the local drugstore deals.  I ran in to CVS last week for the free egg coloring kit, and free Green Bag Tags, but those were no-brainers.  I popped in to Harris Teeter on Tuesday to get milk, before Super Doubles started, and picked up a couple of the better deals, like the brown sugar for 24 cents a pound and the free Yakisoba noodles, but it's an underwhelming sale when I can't even hit the maximum 20 coupons allowed per day at the store.

And the Coupon Gods spoke, "Let there be Super Doubles," and there were Super Doubles, and it was good.

On Wednesday, I paid $11.33, saved almost 86%, and walked out with:

6 individual Bounty paper towel rolls
2 two-packs of Seventh Generation paper towels
1 Lysol toilet bowl cleaner
1 Lysol disinfecting wipes
3 jars of Classico pasta sauce
9 assorted flavors of Powerade, 32 oz
6 assorted flavors of Propel Zero, 24 oz
4 boxes of Cheese Nips
2 boxes of Kahiki egg rolls

On Thursday, I paid $7.82, saved almost 90%, and walked out with:

2 boxes of Earth's Best baby cookies
3 jars of Classico pasta sauce
3 bottles of Log Cabin syrup
4 boxes of Cheese Nips
3 assorted flavors of Powerade, 32 oz
2 assorted flavors of Propel Zero, 24 oz
1 bottle Hidden Valley Ranch
1 twelve-pack of LaCroix seltzer cans, lime
1 tub of Seventh Generation baby wipes
3 single packets of Tide
6 travel-size Johnson and Johnson first aid kits
1 Calamari steak (it looked interesting)
2/3 lb of Roast Beef from the deli

Not at all shabby, if I do say so myself.

A lot of my deals would not have been possible without the help of my swap buddies.  Both my local swap group and some of my family members hooked me up, big time, with some excellent coupons.  For that, they are rewarded with reciprocity (I give them coupons too) and presents (the Freebie Fairy brings gifts at random to those in need, or just those in need of a proper thank you gift).

Rite Aid trips 4/16/2011

Today, I made the happy mistake of checking a local Rite Aid that I generally avoid to see if they had any of this week's sale items in stock.  Specifically, I was hunting Biore strips.  Not only did they have them, they had them in abundance, and I was inspired to visit all 3 of my local Rite Aids to score some deals.  Between the 3 stores, I did 7 transactions so I could use soon expiring $1 off you order Video Values coupons.

As I am generally opposed to shelf clearing, I limited myself at each visit based on how much stock the store had.

Today's score: 5 packs of Biore strips, 5 assorted Biore cleansers, 5 John Frieda shampoo, 2 John Frieda conditioner, 5 John Frieda Full Repair stylers, 1 John Frieda Weather Works/Frizz Eaze styler, and, not pictured, a lip gloss and 2 Old Spice body washes.

The lip gloss was courtesy of my daughter, who came with me and was lobbying for make-up.  After coupons, one of my transactions had a subtotal of $9.99.  I had $10 +UPs that I had planned on using to pay for the purchase, and, as teenagers are want to do, my daughter recognized a moment of weakness when I said, "Really?!?" to the cashier, and I caved.  At that moment, being short ONE cent to be able to use the +UP, and knowing I was going to be making money, I let her have a full priced item.  I don't carry make-up coupons in my binder, unless they're a known moneymaker, because I don't wear make-up.  $4.99 for lip gloss, yikes!

Even after expensive lip gloss, I made money on this stuff today.  I had spent my last few +UPs last week buying baby stuff that is never free (though I do insist on getting a good deal), so I had to actually spend real money today.  Here's the break-down.

Spent $25.99, got back $30 +UPs.

Spent $10 +UPs and $6.61, got back $14 +UPs. (lip gloss, anyone?)

Spent $4 +UPs and $2.66, got back $10 +UPs.

Spent $2.31, got back nothing.

Spent $6.93, got back nothing, but I should have received $10 +UPs.

Got $10 gift card back, because my +UPs didn't print.

Spent $2.31, paid using GC, got back the $10 +UPs I should have gotten before.***

Spent $7.93, most of that what was left on the GC, got back $10 +UPs.

I got back $15.26 more in +UPs than I spent in the store.  Even if you subtract the $10 I made that I shouldn't have because their computer burped, I still made money.

***Failure to print was in one store, printing was in a completely different store.  I didn't even look at the receipt before putting it in my pocket, because there shouldn't have been a +UP.  Didn't even notice it til I came home and wanted to see how much I made.

I work pretty hard trying to make money at the drugstores.  It's all a cleaver ploy to reduce my cost for items I actually need, like diapers, that are almost never free.  The drugstores have pretty good diaper prices frequently enough, at least once a month jumbo packs are under $5 after +UPs and coupons at Rite Aid.  I haven't paid more than $5 for a pack of diapers since the baby was born, and the lowest I've lucked in to was $2.99 each.  Making $15 equates to 3 or more free packs of diapers later, when they go on sale.

Free is the greatest four letter word in the English language.

Starting a price book and meal planning

Ah, normalcy.  In the past 2 weeks, Super Doubles came to a close, there were 2 birthdays in my household, lots of doctors appointments and assorted other weirdness.  It is good to be back.

I mentioned in a previous post my rules for stockpiling.  I've also talked a bit about how I shop.

If you're a shop for the week shopper, you need some place to start.

First, you should consider meal planning.  I, personally, fail at this for a number of reasons, many of which are outside my control.  If you're a new convert of the stock up and save cult, you'll really want to give this a try.  As a lifelong stockpiler, I do a pretty good job of anticipating what my family will eat or want prepared and keep enough around to keep everyone happy without a meal plan.

First, what does your family eat regularly.  Write it down.  Figure out how much of what you consume in an average week or month.  Maybe you do Tuesday pasta night and use 2 lbs of pasta a large jar of sauce.  Maybe you make meatloaf twice a month and buy 2.5 lbs of ground beef for that.  Over the course of the average week maybe you open 9 cans of veggies.  Whatever it is your family eats, and eats on a semiregular basis, write it down, both the meal and the ingredients.  Make absolutely sure you include your go-to recipes.

I'm a fan of spreadsheets, but you can do it on paper.  Take your list of ingredients, and select 10-20 that you use most frequently.  Also list things your family eats regularly that may not be an ingredient, like cereal.  Grab the sale fliers for this week, and flip through.

When you find an item on your list in the sale flier, next to that item, write down the price you'll pay both before and after coupons, the unit size, the sale date (keep it simple, just pick the start date of the sale week), and the name of the store with the best deal.  Your price book is born!  Gather your sale ads weekly and repeat this process, updating with the best price you find on your items to get a good feel for how things are priced at stores in your area.  As time goes on, add items to your price book.  You don't want to start by tracking 100 items, that's too daunting a task.  As time goes on, you may eventually want to track that many, but start small with the items you buy most frequently and then expand from there.

The best deal isn't always the jumbo package.  The best deal is the item with the lowest unit cost.  This is why you start off by jotting down the price and the unit size.  For example, let's say you're pricing your favorite cereal.  Normally, the 20 oz box is $5 and the 12 oz box is $3.50.  5/20= .25 and 3.50/12= .292, so normally the larger box has a lower unit cost and is a better deal.  But you have a coupon for 75 cents off one box, 11 oz or greater, and your store doubles 75 cent coupons, so your coupon is worth $1.50 off a box.  Now the big box is (5-1.50)/20= .175 per ounce and the small box is (3.50-1.50)/12= .167 per ounce.  The small box is the better deal this week.

With your price book in hand, you can go to the store every week and see if the price on the shelf is a good deal or not.  Sales cycle every 3-4 months, so after a while you'll find the rock bottom pricing on the items in your price book.  Everytime you find a better price, you should make a note of it in your price book.  After a while, you'll be able to glance at your price book and know that it's about time for an item category to go on sale at a stock up price, and you can plan accordingly.

Once you know what is and what isn't a good deal, you can begin stocking up.  A stockpile is like a house, you build it one piece at a time.  The longer you stockpile, the larger it can become.  The more items and the more quantity in your stockpile, the longer you can hold out for a good deal.  Ideally you will get enough stock in what your family uses when it's at rock bottom pricing to bridge to the next rock bottom sale.  It won't happen overnight, but it will happen.

Now, back to that meal plan.  You've written down meals your family eats regularly, made a list of items needed for those meals, and started a price book.

Let's say, in an average week, your family spends $35 on meat and usually eats chicken for dinner twice.  You pick up the sale flier, and chicken is on sale BOGO.  You can buy twice as much chicken as you usually do for the same money.  If you do nothing to change what your family eats this week, you just buy extra chicken and add it to the freezer, you're ahead.  You haven't spent any more money, and you've added to your stockpile.  Next week when the chicken isn't on sale, you don't have to buy it.  You can spend your grocery dollar on something else that is on sale and add it to your stockpile.

If, however, you decide to make chicken 3 times this week instead of 2, and pass on the full price ground beef you'd be making into meatloaf, you can stretch your grocery dollar even further and add more chicken to your stockpile for the same money or spend less this week on groceries without actually adding to your stock.  If money is tight, I recommend meeting in the middle, buying a little extra for your stock and adding it to your meal plan, that way you see a reduction in your grocery bill right now and have added a little to your stock so that next week you don't have to pay full price for chicken.  The money that is freed in next weeks budget that would have gone to buying chicken can be spent increasing your stock on what is on sale that week.

It's a wonderfully vicious cycle.  Once you get a good stock going of items your family regularly consumes, you get to stand back and marvel that people pay more than $1 for a box of cereal and over 50 cents for a jar of peanut butter ever.

Getting a stockpile built takes time.  You won't get every good deal, and you should never beat yourself up because you got what you thought was a good deal last week (and last week it was the best deal you could find) only to find the same item cheaper this week.  I beat myself up once, early on, for having "wasted" a coupon so I could get toothpaste for 24 cents only to find it was free with that same coupon the next week.  I was new at couponing, and 24 cents for a tube of toothpaste was an amazing deal to me at that point.  The longer you stockpile, the lower your buy price will be.  Before couponing, I wouldn't dream of paying more than $2 for a box of cereal, now I won't pay more than $1, and even at $1 I'm not happy about it.  I know that soon enough it will be 50 cents, or even free.  There's actually a deal this week near me for free cereal, and if you "buy" 3 or more boxes of the free cereal you get a catalina coupon for a free gallon of milk.  :D

I heart Super Doubles

If it were possible to be in love with a couponing event, I would be in love with Super Doubles.  Harris Teeter has some wonderful coupon policies.  I know I've bemoaned the couponing limits locally, and yes, HT has couponing limits that I wish would go away, but they are the only chain locally that allows the use of an electronic coupon and a paper coupon on the same item.  If it's a current ecoupon, you can even reload it and go back in and use it again.

Very recently, they removed the BOGO Philly Cooking Cream ecoupon.  That's OK, I scored that deal several times last SD, and that it was still do-able at the beginning of this one was awesome.

The Philly Cooking Cream deal went like this:  ecoupon for BOGO Philly Cooking Cream, buy 2 at $2.99 each, use 2 $1.50 coupons, that double to the cost of the item making them free AND get $2.99 off from the ecoupon.  $2.99 overage, every day.

This SD, there's a deal on Jello Temptations 3 packs.  There's a BOGO ecoupon.  There's a printable for $1 off 1.  There's a catalina deal when you buy 2 or more.  HT will only accept 2 identical internet printables per day, which is fine.  Print 2, load ecoupon, buy 2.  They're $3.19 each, so $6.38 for 2.  Take off 2 $1 off coupons, doubled, and they're $2.38.  Take off another $3.19 for the ecoupon, and there's 81 cents overage AND a catalina prints for $1 off your next order.

Printing extra copies of this coupon from additional computers is nice, but not necessary to keep the moneymaker Jello flowing.  In many packages (and it says so on the back of the carton) there are 75 cent off coupons.  So, when you buy your first 2, make sure you grab cartons that will yield coupons.  Go home, take the individual cups out of the package and cut the coupon from the carton.  Reload the ecoupon.

Let's do the new math.  2 Jello Temptations are $6.38, minus 2 doubled 75 cent coupons, and we're at $3.38.  Take off the BOGO ecoupon, and were at 19 cents.  Pay 19 cents plus tax, get a $1 off your next order catalina.  You're ahead 81 cents.

The catalina gets higher with 3 or 4 Jello Temptations in your order, but the math works out that doing it 2 at a time is a better deal.  HT will only double 3 identical coupons, so if you used 4 they'd double 3, give you face value on the 4th, take off the BOGO and issue a catalina for $3 off your next order.  It would work out $12.76 - $4.50 - $0.75 - $3.19 = $4.32 and get back a $3 catalina.  They wouldn't be free if you bought 4 using 75 cent coupons.  If you used 2 printable $1 coupons (remember, you can only use 2 printables at HT) and 2 of the 75 cent coupons, you could make money on them, but you make more just buying 2 using the 75 cent coupons ($12.76 - $4 - $3 - $3.19 = $2.57 and you'd get back a $3 off catalina, you're only making 43 cents).

You can just take my word for it that buying 3 is also not as good a deal as just buying 2.

Today I hit HT, and spent a fair bit more than I wanted.  I got some meat at the deli and a piece of salmon at my husband's request.  Those two were more than half my $22 total.  I grabbed a few things for the price of sales tax, and swung by the teen shelter to drop them off.  I really have no need of more free dental floss at this time, and my family has been appropriately equipped with free electric toothbrushes, so the free toothbrushes weren't really needed either.  I didn't need the free milk, and I'm pretty sure I didn't have room in my fridge for the free yogurt.  I shopped at a slightly further away HT than usual because that one is very close to the shelter, and it would be collectively less driving.

I've dropped off at this shelter 3 times so far, and I've not seen the same staff members twice.

I played coupon fairy again today, which was fun.  A 20-something male with his girlfriend, and he got really excited at the 67 cent Classico pasta sauce, the girlfriend just seemed annoyed.  Then there was the hippie in the coffee aisle buying Starbucks coffee.  I offered her $1.50 off Starbucks coupons, explained to her how SD works, and that with the coupons she could buy 3 today for $2.99 each.  She took 3 coupons, which is the limit for identical coupons, complimented my binder, grabbed 2 more Starbucks from the shelf and thanked me.

3/23 Super Doubles at Harris Teeter

I love Harris Teeter.

OK, so, today I acquired ....

2 boxes of Hefty 13 gallon trash bags
6 jars Classico Alfredo
3 Gatorade Recovery 03
3 McCormick Herbs and Spices
3 packs of Reach Floss
2 Jello Temptations 3 packs
2 lbs HT brand butter
3 Danimals Crush
1 Danactive

Total before coupons and in store savings:  $100.76
Coupon savings:  $61.68
Total paid including sales tax:  $11.50 ($1.19 was tax)
Savings:  $89.26 or 88.6%
And I was issued 2 catalina coupons at check out for a total of $3.50 off my next order.

Super Doubles

One of the grocery stores in my area is Harris Teeter.  Every 4-6 weeks, Harris Teeter runs Super Doubles.  Normally, HT doubles coupons up to 99 cents (limit 20 per day, limit 3 identical per day, per household).  During Super Doubles, HT doubles coupons up to $1.98.

Generally, I spend half my monthly grocery budget during a SD week, but I make out like a bandit.  Last SD, I got enough guacamole to give away and still have a year's supply in my freezer for the price of sales tax.  I could have painted my body several times with Philly Cooking Cream, which was a money maker, with no regrets.  I scored several bottles of high end shampoo for 50 cents each, and more free dish soap.

This SD, while not looking as promising as last SD, should still be good.  I have a couple of good Qs for stuff we use everyday that I should be able to get great deals with.

I went to a coupon swap this evening, oddly this one and the one on Thursday were planned before there were SD rumors floating around the blogosphere.  Because of SD, we had a really high turn out.

One woman was chatting up our organizer about doing SD, starting couponing and stockpiling.  I had to say something.

"Make your list.  Pull your coupons.  Go in, get what you came to get and GET OUT."

Seriously, that's the best way to beat the store at their own game, and it's the only way to win.  Put the blinders on.  Get it done.

If you're new to couponing or stockpiling, and you're used to shopping where they have "Everyday Low Prices" (and they do, don't get me wrong), hit the sale as hard as you can for sale items ONLY, then go where you'd normally shop and pick up the rest of your week's groceries.

Super Doubles starts at 7 am on Wednesday.  I will be going.  Last SD I hit them every single day.  I'm hoping not to do that this time, but we'll see.  If the deals are that good, I may just have to.

I will be posting my SD totals and savings.  Stay tuned.

Where to get coupons

The easiest way to get the most coupons with the least effort is to get the paper.  There are some parts of the country that don't get the coupons in the paper, they get them in the mail.  You can check which yours is (paper or mail) here, at Redplum.

The 2 inserts that are in the paper almost every week are Smartsource and Redplum.  Sometimes there's more than one of each.  Most of the time it'll say "Smartsource" or "Redplum" in big letters on the front, but some weeks you'll find inserts that don't clearly say, like finding the big G from General Mills on the cover.  If you looked on the spine (in VERY small type) it says it's a Smartsource.  The publication date is also in mice type on the spine, if you choose to not cut until you need a coupon and fail to write the date on the insert, you can find it.  About once a month there's also a P&G insert.

Smartsource and Redplum both have websites with printable coupons.  A lot of times, the coupons there are identical to the ones in the paper, though not ALL the paper coupons are there.  If you can't get your hands on the paper, or don't want to buy more papers just for one or two really GOOD coupons, you can try their websites.  Sometimes you get lucky.  On weeks I've failed to get a paper, a few since having a baby, the printables have kept me from missing out on all the freebies that week.  I still miss out on some of the deals, but you learn to recognize a good coupon when you see it.

Other ways to get coupons are to sign up for free samples.  All You does a free sample daily on their website, just scroll down and click on the daily free sample link.  A lot of free samples will come with a coupon.  Some don't, but enough do that it's worth it.  Check a few days back (I've even gone back a few weeks) on samples if you see something that interests you.  Sometimes they're still available.

I can't recommend signing up for the P&G samples enough.  They come with lots of coupons.  

You should request the P&G Brandsampler.  Request them all, even if there's stuff on there you won't use.  Extra coupons to share and trade are always a good thing.  Courtesy of P&G I've got an assortment of travel size goodies lying in wait for our next vacation, Pantene, Crest, Tide, all in small travel sizes and ready to go.

While P&G makes .... everything .... and you should sign up for their stuff (get and use an email address just for couponing, it will seriously save your sanity), less mamouth companies, and even subsidiaries of mamouth companies, have their own sites where you can sign up for coupons and samples.

For example, Beechnut.  Sign up for their newsletter and get a free toddler welcome kit.  Whether you use Beechnut or not, you'll get coupons, which may get you some free stuff.  If you don't want it, you can always donate it or keep the coupons to swap and trade.

There are a lot of coupons to be had on Facebook.  Lots of companies are running promotions on Facebook offering some really good stuff.  Sometimes it's a freebie.  Sometimes it's $1 off.  Point being, if you use a product, like them on Facebook and check to see if they're running a promo.  CVS ran a promo where everyone who liked them and then registered for the promo got emailed a 20% coupon to nonsale merchandise that was good for a couple of days.  Coffeemate ran a promo a that literally shut down their page it got so much traffic, but if you were one of the lucky ones you could print a coupon for a free Coffeemate creamer.  Other manufacturer's will mail you a coupon if you sign up on their Facebook page.  If they don't have a promo now, they may later, and if you like them you'll see it on your page.  Like away.

Sneaky manufacturers put coupons inside their product packaging.  Sometimes they'll advertise it on the outside of the box, sometimes they won't.  I make a habit of checking inside boxes before I toss them in the recycling, and I fish through after my kids when I see one of them has tossed a box.  Also, if a product has a pamphlet, check it for coupons too.  I've scored some good high value coupons with far out expiration dates on some of our favorite products this way, coupons on the inside of the cereal box, coupons on the instruction sheet for the infant vitamins, coupons on the pamphlet inside a box of Biore.  Coupons are everywhere, you just have to keep an eye out for them.

You can also find coupons in the store.  Blinkies, peelies and tearpads are everywhere.  Take what you need, try not to get greedy, if there are plenty you can grab some to share.  Blinkies are found in those boxes hanging off the shelf with the blinking light that dispense coupons.  Peelies are stuck on the product packaging, you just have to peel them off (never depend upon the cashier to do this, btw).  Tearpads are a pad that you tear a few off of.  For all of these, even if you're not buying the item today, if you will buy it in the near future, grab a few, but don't get greedy.  I was in the store a week after a good sale on Martha White muffin mix.  I'd stocked up.  They put a new blinkie out in front of the Martha White.  If the same sale comes up again, and I have these new coupons, I will be able to get packages of Martha White muffin mix for 4 cents each.  I didn't need any more right now, but I grabbed a few coupons anyway, and filed them away to match with a good sale later.

Always, always, ALWAYS take a stroll through the beer and wine section if you live in a No Beverage Purchase Required (NBPR) state.  Most times it's a bust, but when you score you can score big.  With March Madness coming up and St. Patty's, I've been finding rebates from Guiness ($4 back When You Buy (WYB) $4.01 of meat, cheese or bread), Murphy's ($2 back WYB corned beef) and Miller ($2 off 2 Digiornos pizza).  I live in a NBPR state, so I don't have to buy alcohol to make use of these offers.  If you don't live in a NBPR state, still take a walk through beer and wine.  Your favorite brand may be running a promo that you can take advantage of.

And lastly, a great way to get coupons is to share them.  I belong to a swap group.  Some churchs have coupon boxes for you to leave what you don't want and take what you do.  Point here is you can get more coupons for the things you use by offering coupons for the things you don't to others.  If I have a baby and you have a dog, I can give you all the dog supply coupons I get, you can give me all the baby supply coupons you get.  We've both got twice as many of what we need now, and we didn't have to buy another paper.

Which brings up subscriptions.  It is almost always cheaper to subscribe than to pay at the store.  On top of that, many papers will give you a discount if you want more than one copy of the paper each week.  My local paper charges $1, as opposed to $1.50 for the first copy delivered and $2 at the store, for each additional copy of the paper I want delivered.

Some weeks the inserts are so good you may want to run out and grab an extra copy or five.  I know I have.  I resist the urge unless I know, with absolute certainty, that the extra copy will pay for itself immediately.  I have been known, on seriously excellent coupon weeks, to get 8 copies of the paper.  I did not buy 8 copies all at once.  I bought 2, clipped the coupons, scored at least $10 worth of stuff for the price of sales tax, bought 2 more papers, repeat.  The greatest coupons in the world are only useful if your store has stock of the item.  I try not to be too greedy with the freebies or the papers.  I'm not the only one trying to get good deals, so I try to leave enough for everyone else.  I've not yet found a deal that I wanted so badly that I was willing to buy a lot and clean out a store.  Since I've started coupon swapping, the number of weeks I get extra copies of the paper and the number of extra copies I grab has gone down.  When I can easily pick up 2-10 copies of the great coupons I would have bought an extra paper for just by trading with friends it reduces the amount of money I have to spend.  Saving money is the point of the exercise, after all, and you're not really saving a lot if you're just spending all your savings on more newspapers.  Unless you have a really large family, 1 or 2 copies of the paper should be enough to meet your needs most weeks.

There are also clipping services available online.  You can't buy coupons, but you can pay someone for their time clipping them.  I know a couple of people who prefer to order the really good coupons from clipping services instead of buying several papers to get extras.  I have not yet tried one, so I can't make any recommendations.

A quick word about trading coupons....

I never, ever, trade internet printable coupons with people I wouldn't trust with my life.  Internet coupons, most of them anyway, have unique identifying coding on them.  If they are copied and the copies are used, the company will know and your IP address will get banned from printing.  Stores do not get reimbursed for copies.  A number of people I've talked to don't seem to be bothered by that.  That's very shortsighted.  If the stores don't get paid, they're going to stop accepting IP coupons, many already don't accept them, that means fewer good deals for all of us.  On top of that, if you're giving them a fraudulent coupon you are leaving the store with merchandise that won't be paid for, that's technically stealing.

Let me be clear.  Not only will I not give someone an IP coupon I have printed, I will not accept and use an IP coupon from someone else.  Even if what they're giving me appears to be an original, I have no idea if it has been copied.  I refuse to participate in an activity that will harm us all.  There are too many good deals to be had without committing fraud.

Rite Aid trip 3/13/2011

I visited Rite Aid today.  I spent most of my prep time on the CVS deal.  Had I done more than quickly flip through Rite Aid's ad (which I've done since coming home), I'd have noticed other good deals.  In a quick flip, I saw these.  40 count Motrin PM on sale for $3 each with a $1 +UP reward.

I've been couponing for a few months, and back in January Rite Aid had 20 count Motrin PM on sale for $3 with a $2 +UP.  In that Sunday's paper there were coupons for $6 off when you buy 2 Motrin (and a couple of other items).  I remember grabbing as many as I could then, because $2 back more than covers the sales tax on $3, so they were all money makers.  In the time since, I've been to several coupon swaps.  At every swap I've been to, I've found these $6 off 2 coupons.  I've picked up quite a few.  In fact, a few weeks back Tylenol Precise was also a money maker if you had these coupons.  I've been making money hand over fist on these coupons, and I still have more.

Anyway, quick flip through the ad and there's $3 Motrin PM with a $1 +UP.  I run in, grab 6, pay and get out.

My subtotal was zero, but I had to pay $1.40 in sales tax.  On my receipt, it printed 6 +UPs for $1 each.  Math time:  $6 earned - $1.40 spent = $4.60 money maker.

CVS trip 3/13/2011

Today, I ventured to CVS.  I had $12.98 in ECBs to roll, and there were deals to be had.

Before I go too far, I have to say, while I only have one Extracare card, my mother has made her Extracare card available to me.  When there is a limit of 1, like this week's baby deal, having a second card to use is wonderful.  Today, I used Mom's Extracare card because I had earned ECBs on her card and they were due to expire later this week.  I have ECBs from my card, but they don't expire until April.  If you don't use them you lose them, and if I can't make it back to get a deal, or the deals are sold out, with my card's ECBs I still have time to roll those without losing them.

I decided to split my order up into two transactions.  Doing so would allow me to immediately roll ECBs from the first order on to the second, reducing my out of pocket (OOP) and reducing the amount of ECBs I'll have to work to roll later on.  I could have done a better job spliting it up had I thought about it.

For my first order, I got a pack of Tena.  They're adult incontinence pads.  I don't need them, but they're easily donateable.  They're on sale for $9.99 with a $9.99 ECB.  There's also a coupon on Tena's website for $2.50 off.  Money maker!

I paid for the Tena using $7.99 in ECBs, the $2.50 coupon from their website, and 12 cents in cash.  I got back $9.99 in ECB.  I made $1.88 on the deal (the rest of the $2.50 from the coupon was absorbed by sales tax).  I also still have $4.99 ECB that I walked in the door with.

In my second order I purchased 1 Enfamil Newborn powder tub and a 50 count Advil (which was oddly part of the baby deal, between those 2 I met the $25 threshold to earn ECBs), 1 Dulcolax Balance 14 count, 1 Dulcolax tablets 25 count, and (2) 150 count Dentek picks.

Both the Dulcolax are on sale this week for $4.99.  CVS mailed me coupons a few weeks back, one was for $5 off Dulcolax Balance 14 count, and one was for $3 off any Dulcolax.  $5 off a $4.99 product is my kind of deal, and for the price of sales tax I'm OK with adding it to my assortment of OTC medications for whenever we might need them in the future.  But it gets better.  Those coupons are both CVS coupons, which means I could stack a manufacturer's coupon on for greater savings.  A little web searching later and I found $4 off any Dulcolax coupons printable online (most online printables are a limit of 2).  So, I could get two Dulcolax, at least one of them being the Balance variety, for $9.98 - $8 in CVS coupons - $8 in manufacturer's coupons = $6.02 overage towards the rest of my order.

Dentek has an ECB deal, spend $5 get $2 ECB.  I had 2 $1 off 1 Dentek over $2 coupons.  My family likes and uses these products, they don't often go on sale or have coupons.  I selected (2) 150 count Dentek picks priced at $3.49 each.  Take off $1 each from my coupons, and they'll give me back $2 in ECB.  Not a bad deal.

I need formula.  Enfamil is what my baby prefers, and all this effort for money makers and overage was really a blatant attempt to get the cost of the formula down.  CVS's sale this week on Enfamil is really good, but with a little strategy I knew I could make it better.  The Advil was the low price, name brand item I could buy to hit the $25 that I also had a coupon for.  $22 for the Enfamil, with a $2 off coupon and a $5 formula check, $4.50 for the Advil with a $2 coupon, and hitting the $25 mark I get $10 back in ECBs.

I give the cashier my 2 CVS Dulcolax coupons, $8 in total, the ECBs I brought in and just earned on the Tena, $14.98, $2 Enfamil coupon, $2 Advil coupon, (2) $1 Dentek coupons, (2) $4 Dulcolax coupons and a $5 Enfamil check.

My total:  $3.58

My receipt prints $10 and $2 ECBs for the baby deal and the Dentek.

Let's do the math.

I walked in with $12.98  in ECBs.  I paid them $3.70 ($3.58 + $0.12 from the Tena transaction) in real money.  I walked out with $12 in ECBs and all that stuff.

$3.70 plus the 98 cents more in ECBs I spent than made, and if we say everything else was free, I just paid $4.68 for a large tub of Enfamil powder.  Those things retail around $25 in most stores.

I could have done better, but my CVS was out of the free after ECB Theraflu singles that I found a $2 off coupon for.  Maybe they'll have it later in the week.  If not, I'll get a raincheck.

Having a plan: Playing the drugstore game at Rite Aid

Rite Aid may be the most complicated of the drugstores to work, but they are hands down the best deal.

Rite Aid has a rewards program, called wellness+.  You can go in to Rite Aid and get a wellness+ card.  They will keep track of how much you've spent, and when you've earned enough points you'll get a discount everyday on regularly priced merchandise in the store.  You earn 25 points filling a prescription (with certain limitations, like you don't earn points if the prescription was paid for using Medicare/Medicaid).  You earn one point per dollar spent in the store.  At 500 points, you've earned an everyday discount of 10% off regularly priced items.  At 1000 points, you've earned 20% off the same.  At 125, 250 and 375 points, you'll earn a 10% off savings pass good for one purchase.

Like CVS and Walgreens, Rite Aid has a reward that prints at the register good towards your next purchase.  At Rite Aid, they're called +UPs.  To get +UPs you make a qualifying purchase (either something from the sale flier or something with in store signage, or sometimes even something that has no signage in your store for whatever reason) and +UPs print at the end of your receipt.  +UPs can not be applied to sales tax, just like the other drugstore programs.  You need to use your wellness+ card at the register to get +UPs, but even if your purchase will not generate +UPs you should use it anyway so that your purchase will count towards earning your next reward level.

Pretty frequently there's something or other available for free after +UP reward.  You go in, pay the sale price and a +UP for the price of the item prints at the end of your receipt.  So long as you use the +UP before it expires, you've not paid anything but sales tax on the item.  In a perfect world, you roll your +UPs by spending them on other items that generate +UPs (or rebates, but we'll get to that).

In addition to +UP instant rebates, Rite Aid has Single Check Rebates.  Every month they publish a flier with all the rebate items and amounts listed.  You buy an item during its rebate period (some times it's the whole month, sometimes it's a particular week) and you submit it for the rebate.  You can only request a check once per month, which is why it's called Single Check Rebates.  You can keep your receipts and mail them with the form in the SCR flier OR you can enter them online as you make purchases.  The later is a vastly superior method.  So long as you remember to enter the receipt when you get home, there's nothing to keep track of.  Once you sign up online for the rebates, there are no annoying forms to fill out.  Keeping track of things, or lack thereof, and not wanting to fill out forms to mail are two very common reasons people don't submit rebates.  I like that I don't have to waste the postage.

Submitting SCR online also allows you to double dip, or at least not stress separating orders.  There have been manufacturer's mail in rebates for all sorts of things.  It can be a giant pain to sort out what in your basket is for a SCR and what in your basket is for a manufacturer's rebate, and heaven forbid something qualifies as both or you make a mistake and buy an item with the wrong order.  You can submit your receipt information on the SCR site, and still have the receipt to mail in for another rebate.

A few times a month, items will be free after SCR.  For those not inclined to keep track of +UPs, these are awesome (they're awesome either way to be honest).  You buy the item, go home and enter your receipt on the website and at the end of the month you request your rebate check.  Rite Aid sends you a check for the cost of the item, and all you are out is the sales tax.  If you use the occasional coupon, you can actually make back the cost of sales tax and unlike +UPs this is a real check you can take to the bank and get real money to spend any way you want.  If you can keep track of your +UPs, free after SCR items are a good way to spend +UPs and get back real money.

Now, if you use coupons for your item, you can still submit for the full value of the SCR.  If you pay entirely with +UPs, you can still submit for the full value of the SCR.  If you've earned an everyday wellness+ discount, you can still submit for the full value of the SCR.  If a SCR is for ALL of a particular item, and you find one on clearance, you can still submit for the full value of the SCR (last month, all Almay eye make-up had a $2 SCR, and I found a less popular shade set on clearance for $1.94, it had "gift for my young niece" written all over it).

Rite Aid has in ad coupons which you can stack with manufacturer's coupons to get a better deal, but the real magic with Rite Aid's own coupons are their Video Values program.  You sign up for Video Values on their website.  You watch short video ads, many of them the exact same commercials that are on TV, and you earn credits.  Some of the credits are for the particular item you are viewing an ad for.  Some of the credits are cummulative towards a larger reward.  Some are good for both.

For example, this month there is a Video Value beauty bonus.  You watch 12 videos and earn $2 off a $10 beauty purchase.  Some of the videos also earn you a coupon towards that item.  If you watch all the beauty bonus videos, you can print the $2 off $10 coupon, and the individual item coupons.  If you select $10 worth of product, you can use both the $2 off coupon and the coupon for the item AND, if you have a manufacturer's coupon, you can use that too.  I, personally, do not wear make-up (weird for a woman, I know) or I would dazzle you with a deal scenario that I'd done recently using these offers.  I may not wear make-up, but I watched the videos anyway.  You never know what will go on sale, and I've been known to print out the right combination of VV coupons to stack with manufacturer's coupons to score free product.  I  have a daughter, and she loves it when I tell her there is free make-up to be had.

Most Video Values ads are short, around 30 seconds.  Some can be as long as 4 minutes, but those tend to be either high value product coupon offers or $$ off your purchase.

Video Values coupons are store coupons.  In ad coupons are store coupons.  Even though they're both store coupons, you can stack VV with in ad coupons on the same item.  The most recent example of this was during this past week's sale.  There was an in ad coupon for $5 off 3 Dixie products.  There was also a VV coupon this month for $5 off 3 Dixie products.  I used them both, coupled with a 10% off regularly priced merchandise coupon (Dixie wasn't on sale so the 10% off applied), and I got 3 packs of Dixie plates for 79 cents plus tax.  I have a friend who is at the 20% off reward level, and with those same coupons her total was $1.20 less than mine.  Let's do a little math, .79 - 1.20 = -.41.  That's right, she got free plates and 41 cents credit towards the rest of her basket for watching a short video (actually, she also had a manufacturer's coupon for $3 off 2 Dixie which they also took and deducted from her total, but I have no idea where she found it).

Rite Aid, more so than the other drugstores, has awesome stacking opportunities that can trivially net you free product.  Moneymaker opportunities are plentiful almost every week.  If you take the time to watch the Video Values, without buying newspapers and clipping coupons, and spending less than 5 minutes a week researching the ad, you can easily pick up $50 worth of product a month for pennies on the dollar.  A few minutes research for online printable coupons to match with free or almost free after +UP or SCR, and you can make money almost every week.  Become a serious couponer, collect coupon inserts from the paper for a few months, and making $10+ a week becomes fairly common.

I didn't hit Rite Aid all that hard last week.  I got 12 cans of sardines (donating), 4 cans of tuna, 4 Thermacare heat wraps, (5) 32 oz Similac, 1 box of Similac RTF newborn bottles, 2 Ester-C, 1 Keri lotion, 3 packages of Dixie plates, 4 tubes of toothpaste, a Snickers bar and a bottle of Cepacol (which my husband had to have because he didn't feel well, I paid full price, no coupon).  I spent $3 more in +UPs than I earned on my transactions.  I spent about $4 in sales tax and small overages.  I earned $14 in SCR which I will get a check for after I submit when the month is over.  Not a gang-buster week, but I got all that product and in the end they'll pay me $7 more than I spent for it.  My SCR for February (which I only requested this week and hasn't arrived yet) was $49.97.

Good shopping trip at Rite Aid

My Rite Aid purchase 3/11/2011

In this picture there are (2) 32 oz Ready To Feed Similac, (1) 8 pack of 2 oz Ready To Feed Similac infant bottles, (1) 15 oz Keri lotion, (2) 10+2 count Ester-C To-Go packs and 1 Thermacare back heat pack 1 count.

I stacked a Rite Aid discount coupon (I'd earned a 10% off regularly priced merchandise coupon) with in ad Rite Aid coupons ($2 off any Similac, $3.99 off Thermacare), Rite Aid Video Values coupons ($2 and $1 off on Ester-C) manufacturer's coupons (2 $3 off Ester-C, $2 off Keri), and used 3 Similac formula checks for $5 each.

I have a baby, but he doesn't drink Similac.  Similac still mails me checks from time to time.  I keep them in the hopes of finding a way to get nearly free formula so I can donate it.

My total came to 19 cents.  I did not pay using any +UPs.

I received back $2 in +UPs, though I'm not entirely certain why.  There is also a $6 Single Check Rebate on the Keri lotion.

I paid 19 cents.  They're giving me back $8.

This is not the first time I've purchased Similac and Thermacare at Rite Aid this week.  My last trip did not generate +UPs.  None of the items had signage to indicate I would earn a +UP.  I think it was for the infant bottles, which I had not purchased before.  The +UP says it's for purchasing "Dsny kids."  That rules out the Ester-C and the Keri.  I had planned to have low OOP and make money, I just made more money than I expected.

And, in other weirdness, there is a Single Check Rebate on 32 oz Similac Concentrate.  I did not buy the concentrate, since it was more expensive and I would have had to pay a couple of bucks more, even after accounting for the rebate, for each bottle.  However, the store shelf signage showed that all 32 oz Similac was eligible for the rebate.  It's a $2 rebate per bottle, limit 4.  If I get it, wonderful.  If I do not, I still made money.  I've entered my receipt at the Rite Aid website for the Keri lotion.  In a few days they'll update my rebates and I'll know, one way or the other, whether I'm getting any more back for buying the formula.  Edit: I submitted my 3/11 and 3/10 receipts on Rite Aid's website last night, both having 32 oz RTF Similac, and the 3/10 receipt updated today showing I'd earned $2 for each of that day's 3 Similac.  It's a limit of 4, so with the 3/11 purchase shown here I won't get $2 for each, just for one more.  Still, that adds $2 to how much money I made on this trip.  I made money by thinking about those in need.  That's just awesome!  I'll use it to cover tax on other freebies I score here and there to donate.

Now, I appreciate that you may not have formula checks laying around, buying formula to donate may not be a free proposition for you and you might not be sitting on a 10% off discount.  That's OK.  With the same Video Values, in ad and manufacturer's coupons, and without +UPs to spend, you would have paid about $2 + tax in cash and had a SCR to submit for $6, which is more than you paid.

Using the 10% off discount, the Thermacare, which is normally $3.99, rang up for $3.59.  The in ad coupon took off $3.99.  I have friends who have earned a 20% off discount everyday on regularly priced merchandise and they've been ringing in at $3.19 - $3.99 in ad coupon, and they're getting 80 cents overage toward the rest of their basket every day.

I aspire to have an every day discount.  I'm at around 300 points.  At 500 points, you get 10% off every day on regularly priced items.  At 1000 points, you get 20% off.  We all should have something to aspire to.

Having a plan: Playing the drugstore game at Walgreens

It's a common opinion among couponers that Walgreens is the hardest of the drugstore chains to score great deals at.  Sure, their sale prices can be just as good as the other stores, but their coupon policies stink.

In CVS and Rite-Aid, the reward coupons that print after you've made your purchase can be used, for the most part, as cash (you can't pay sales tax with them though).  Walgreens rewards coupons, called Register Rewards, or RRs for short, are manufacturer's coupons.  Walgreens will only allow you to use one manufacturer's coupon per item.  If they're having a great sale this week, and by stacking coupons with the sale you can score big, you might need a filler item or 3 to be able to use last week's RRs on your purchase.  Buying filler items, low priced stuff you don't have a coupon for, is something to avoid.  While occasionally miscalculating and grabbing a candy bar to cover overage happens from time to time to even the most math proficient couponer, having to make a habit of it just to get the good deal diminishes the value of that good deal.

Walgreens doesn't have a rewards card like CVS and Rite-Aid.  On it's face, this looks like a good thing.  Limits, after all, are a major impediment to a big score for a couponer.  No rewards card, no tracking how many times you've done a particular deal.  If you've got the time to separate transactions, functionally, there is no limit, past store stock, to how many times you can score a great deal.  There's just one small catch.

If you buy an item that generates RRs, and then try to spend those RRs to pay for an item by the same manufacturer, a new RR will not print for the next transaction.  Let's say something is free after RRs.  You buy it, and get your RR.  If you come back in and try to buy it again, and pay with the first RR, you won't get a new RR.  If you pay cash the second time, you would get a new RR.  Rarely are there enough items free after RR with the same RR value from different manufacturers in a sale week for you to roll RRs well.  Rolling is when you take your rewards and use them to pay for new stuff that generates new rewards.

Sometimes RRs clearly state what you got it for buying, "Thanks from Kleenex," and sometimes they don't, "Thank you for your purchase."  Because I don't know whether they'll be clearly identified or not until they print, I try to avoid buying 2 items in the same transaction that will generate the same value RR.  If I walk out of Walgreens with 2 $2 RRs, and neither of them clearly specifies a manufacturer, I'm going to have a harder time rolling them.  If I walk out of Walgreens with a $1 RR and a $3 RR, I can grab a pencil as soon as I get home and write on the RR that I got it for buying Kleenex.  Since it's fresh in my mind, and even if I forget I have my receipt and sale flier to consult, I'm less likely to fail at rolling it because I know what I can't roll it on.

Another weird thing about RRs that makes them hard to roll, if an item is $2.99, free after RR, the RR that will generate will actually be $3.  If Walgreens has 3 different items from 3 different manufacturers priced at $2.99, free after RR, you can't just buy one and take the RR to get the next one.  You're going to have a penny overage.  Walgreens doesn't like overage.  You'll need a filler.  Fillers diminish the free-ness of the stuff you're getting and make it less a good deal.

Walgreens doesn't really like taking coupons that exceed the value of the item.  CVS and Rite-Aid will both take a $1 off coupon for an 88 cent item, and so long as that does not bring your order total negative, they really don't care.  The manufacturer is going to send them that $1, plus a small handling fee, so they're not out any money.  They won't give you change, but they'll credit $1 towards your order.  The amount over the cost of the item is called overage.  Target won't go that far, but if you present a $1 coupon for an 88 cent item, they will manually enter 88 cents as the coupon value.  I'm OK with that.  Walgreens, on the other hand, outright refuses to accept manufacturer's coupons for more than the cost of the item.  They can, but many won't, manually enter a coupon for the cost of the item.  This makes no sense to me, at all.  If I present a $1 coupon for an 88 cent item, and they mark the coupon down to 88 cents so that I can get my freebie, they still get reimbursed $1 by the manufacturer.  By taking and marking down my coupon, they'd be making more money on my item than the guy behind me paying cash for the same.  Walmart recently announced a change to their coupon policy.  They used to discount coupons, like Target, but now they will allow overage to be applied to your order or will even issue you change from your coupon tender.

Walgreens has in ad coupons some weeks.  They also publish a monthly coupon book that is good all month.  A "month" starts on a Sunday near the beginning of the month and ends on a Saturday near the end of the month, good for either 4 weeks or 5.  Both in ad coupons and coupon book coupons are Walgreens store coupons.  You can "stack" a store coupon with a manufacturer's coupon.  Just remember, if there will be overage, order matters.  A manufacturer's coupon will beep and may not be accepted if it exceeds the cost of the item.  Give them your manufacturer's coupons first, then your store coupon.  A store coupon will not beep if it exceeds the cost of the item, so long as your subtotal (amount before they add tax) will not be negative.  You also need to have enough stuff to cover any overage.  I recommend keeping your store coupons completely out of the cashier's view until they've accepted all your manufacturer's coupons.

Still, every so often a Walgreens deal comes along that is too good to pass up.  Every 6 weeks or so something they have in the ad is good enough to get my attention, and I wander in.  I only do it if it's a moneymaker, or something we use all the time, or something that almost never goes on sale that I feel we should have in the house.

This week, they've got a deal on Pediacare.  I have an infant, and there's a $5 off Pediacare coupon in their sale ad.  It's a Walgreen's coupon, so I could stack it with a manufacturer's coupon if I wanted to.  The Pediacare infant fever drops are $5.99 for 0.5 oz, or $9.xx for 1 oz.  If I get 2 of the 0.5 oz, which would be 1 oz total, I'll pay $1.98, or I can get one of the 1 oz and pay $4.xx (you don't need to be a math whiz to see I'd be getting the same amount of medication for less money, and why I really didn't care to remember the cents on the 1 oz price).  Even if I can't get them to take a manufacturer's coupon, this is something I want in my house.  I'll get over it not being free when I crack it open at 3 am to give to my child instead of sending my husband to the 24 hour grocery to pay $8 for it.  But, there's an internet printable coupon for $2 off any Pediacare.  If I can get them to take them both, I'll have overage.  I look through the ad, and there's a Venus razor, $7.99 with $4 RR back.  I have a coupon for $5 off a Venus razor, if I'm lucky, when I get in the store it will be included in the sale.  If it isn't, I'm going to need to find $2.02 worth of fillers to cover my overage, or the register will beep and I'll have to pay 99 cents for each of my Pediacare.  I now have a plan and head off to Walgreens.

As luck would have it, my razor coupon is for the razor that is on special.  $7.99 - $5 = $2.99  I'm going to pay $2.99 for my razor, and they're going to give me $4 off my next order.  Money maker!  I grab 2 of the 0.5 oz Pediacare.  $5.99 - $2 -$5 = Money maker (times 2)!

I give my cashier the 2 $2 off Pediacare coupons and the $5 off Venus coupon.  She tells me the total.  "Oooh, wait!"  I open the ad like a ninja, and have her scan the in ad coupon.  $5 x 2 comes off.  New total, 97 cents plus sales tax (which gets calculated on your pre-coupon total, this would vary by your tax rate).

I kindly pay my 97 cents plus tax.  The catalina machine spits out a $4 RR.

While I can trivially carry around $20-40 worth of CVS ECBs or Rite-Aid +UPS at any given time, I get concerned if I have more than $5 in RRs.  The whole "free after rewards" thing only works if you use the rewards, otherwise you've paid for your stuff.  In a perfect world, you roll your rewards week to week.  I have difficulty rolling RRs (as do many couponers, that's why we don't shop Walgreens).  In this case, if I fail to use the RR, I'll get over it.  97 cents is not so much to pay for 2 bottles of Pediacare and a Venus razor system.  But $4 is a good amount to have for an RR.  Between now and when it expires, if no good way to roll it presents itself I can always just buy milk.

Shopping: I'm not just here to play, I'm here to win!

My husband, like most people, doesn't really understand the transformation that happens when I walk in to the store to shop.  If you shop the way stores want you to shop, you lose.  I play to win, and make no mistake, shopping is a game of strategy.

I shop in one of two ways.  For the moment, I'm going to talk about strategic shopping.

When I walk in to the store, I have already viewed the ad online, looked for deals, matched some pretty good prices with my coupons, and have a stack of coupons sorted out and ready to go.  I may have sub-stacks for a particular store, lets say they're running a Pillsbury deal and deal on General Mills Cereal.  I'll have a Pillsbury stack, a GM stack, and a stack of assorted other good deals for that store.  I call it my hot list.  There are always unadvertised deals, and I bring my coupons along with me just in case I find some, but my hot list is my game plan.  Some people write down what they intend to get.  The stores near me where I can get the best deals also have the most restrictive coupon policies.  If I can only double 20 coupons per day, and only use 3 identical coupons, a list isn't really necessary to keep me on track.  At most my hot list has 50 coupons, and most of those are multiples, so really I have several copies of 15-25 coupons.  That's not so many that I can't keep track, especially since I have them in my hand.  I keep them together with a binder clip.  I come with an extra binder clip, and as I put things in my cart I move the coupons from the hot list, or my binder, into the other clip so that when I get to the register everything is ready to go.  I have a mesh pouch in my new binder, and I may start using that to hold coupons to give the cashier, but I haven't tried that yet.

Now, most weeks, I don't do a big strategic shop.  I'll walk in to the drug store with my hot list of 2-5 items that are free this week just about every week, but as far as going to the grocery store I go every 2-4 weeks and do a big strategic shop.  The notable exception to this is Super Doubles, but that's a whole other post.

If I haven't been in a store in a while, we do run out of milk so I'll head in for some.  If there are other things we need, I'll check who has a good price on it, but I'm not going to waste a half a gallon of gas to save 10 cents on a gallon of milk and 20 cents on bread when that's really all we need.  I actually enjoy my casual shopping trips because I don't have to put my game face on so much.  I don't buy a lot of high priced stuff, but if I see a good deal I'll grab it.  Most importantly, I don't have to worry about breaking my concentration searching the store for coupons.  The stores closest to my home tend to have lower regular prices on a lot of things, and a fair number of better coupons than the higher priced stores.  I can take the coupons I pick up in one store and use them in the other.  In addition to grabbing bread and milk, I'll do a coupon safari.  The more good coupons I find, the better my trip to the higher priced store will be later.

And yes, I do almost all of my strategic shopping at the higher priced stores.  Why?  Because they offer better sale prices.  If you have the discipline and only grab the best deals at higher priced stores, you can save a ton.  By putting your game face on, buying only the loss leaders and getting out you win.  Loss leaders are the store's way of inticing you in the door.  Once you're there, they are betting you're just going to buy all your normal groceries, and they'll make up the loss on the loss leader when you buy other regularly priced items.  Don't let them win.

Now, if all you need to grab after you get the loss leaders is something small, it's up to you whether the gas to get somewhere that sells it for less is worth it.  I have my own mental list of prices that, no matter the sale that inticed me in the door, I just will not pay more than.  I don't care that I have a cart full of freebies, I'm not paying $5 for a gallon of milk, not when I can go a tenth of a mile out of my way on the ride home and pick it up for around $3.

Play to win.  Be prepared.  Have a plan.

Stockpiling, my rules, my story

Before I took up couponing last year, several people I know expressed amazement at how little I spend to feed my family.  I've always been frugal.  When I first started grocery shopping for myself I shopped the sales and stocked up on the best deals.

My rules for stockpiling are:

1) Buy only the best deals
2) Buy as much as you can afford without otherwise sacrificing your diet
3) Buy as much as you can consume before it goes bad
4) Buy as much as you have room to store

With almost no effort, and before I started couponing or playing the drugstore game, using those 4 simple rules, I was able to feed my family 3 meals a day, including snacks, plus supply personal care items and paper products for $2 per person per day.  And when I say all meals and snack, I mean all meals and snacks.  I homeschool my son.  My husband or I make his lunches.  We rarely eat out, but when we do it is because we are significantly under our $2 per person daily budget.  I don't budget for dining out unless we're planning a trip.

Now that I coupon, I'll be honest with you, I don't spend any less money every month.  What I have done is create a stockpile of items I did not used to keep many of, items we don't use everyday but will use sooner or later that are a fantastic deal***, and I've increased our stockpile of paper products.  I've also bought a lot of food my family won't eat for pennies on the dollar and donated it.

If I get no more for my family by couponing, but it continues to feed my charity addiction without costing me extra money, I will do it forever.

A couple of points about stockpiling...

A stockpile is like a house, you should build it piece by piece.  A stockpile isn't something you go out and buy today.  You could do that, I suppose, but you're not battening down the hatches or preparing for the apocalypse (or maybe you are).  You are building a supply of food and other consumables for yourself and your family that you purchased for a great price so that you can keep your overall costs down.  If that stockpile helps keep your family fed during an emergency, all the better.

Stockpiling is not the same as hording.  Hording is unhealthy and horders should seek help from a mental health professional.  If stockpiling is interfering with your life, your home or your relationships, you might be crossing over from stockpiling to hording.  Get help.

My stockpile helps me sleep at night.  That may sound a little silly, and you may question if I really am a closet horder, but I assure you I am not.

My husband has hinted that I might be a horder, more than once.  My husband also grew up with money and his Mom bought what she wanted to buy at the store regardless of price.  He didn't understand why I would come home with 50 lbs of pasta at a time.  His mother bought a week's groceries at a time, and there's no way we could eat that much pasta in a week.  From his experience, me coming home with much more than a week's worth of groceries just didn't make sense.

Then the transmission in our car died.  It was a 2 year old car and in no reasonable reality did we foresee a major repair this soon.  We needed money.  We didn't have an emergency fund to draw from.  I refused to charge the repair and pay interest.  The transmission shop offered us a payment plan that did not have interest, so long as they got to hold on to a set of keys, if we could make regular monthly payments.  We had to find wiggle room in the budget, and one of the few places to find it was groceries.

For four months I had less than $50 a month to feed my family.  Two teenagers, my husband and my very pregnant self (during the 4th month, I gave birth) had to live largely off of what was in my kitchen.  My husband was worried.  I was not.

My grandmother always said "Hope for the best, plan for the worst."  Emergencies like this are a good part of what stockpiling is all about.

While I will admit it was stressful, and towards the end I was really loathing those cans of green beans, I managed to prove to my husband why keeping a stockpile is a good idea.  We ate.  We ate well, and I spent almost nothing on food.

I don't want to say I enjoyed the experience, I never wanted to have to live off my stockpile and I don't wish that on anyone.  One of the good things I walked away with was a better feel for just how large my stockpile is and where I seem to be lacking in stocking up.  My stockpile was at a nice size in my mind.

When I talk about stockpiles, I don't talk in terms of pounds of food, I talk in terms of time.  How long before our meals start lacking nutritionally?  How long before we run out?  What might be a 2 month stockpile in my house might last 6 months in yours.  It varies based on your family.

Things I learned about my stockpile from having to mostly live off it...

If we continued to eat all we wanted, without rationing at all, we could eat a balanced diet for about 3 months without bringing anything else in to our home.  If we rationed, we could eat a fairly balanced diet for closer to 6 months.  I don't stock nearly as large a supply of protein as I do starches.  My vegetable stockpile is lacking, though not as much as protein.  I need to do a better job of keeping at least 6 months worth of toilet paper in the house at all times.

We're now at 4 months back to normal, financially.  There's no repair payment to be made, and my grocery budget has resumed it's regular size.  I've been restocking slowly, as I find good deals.  We're not back up to our previous level.  We're around 60% of our previous level.  We've made a few trips to our local teen homeless shelter and dropped off soup, bodywash and toothpaste inspite of still being in restocking mode.  It's easy to do when we have plenty for ourselves and I can get more for pennies.

***I mentioned in my last post giving my husband previously purchased free eye drops.  The week before that it was Sucrets.  Freebies we're likely to need in the next few months come home with me all the time.  When I get too many of a particular type of freebie, it gets donated.

Having a plan: Playing the drugstore game at CVS

My general strategy is to pay as little as possible for as much quality stuff as I can.  The more stuff I can get for my family at little cost, the more money I have free in the budget for other things.  When I started couponing, I first tackled learning to play the drugstore game.

Yes, I said drugstore game.  It's like chess.  You make all the right moves and you can be the hands down winner.  Name brand deodorant for the cost of sales tax.  Toothpaste that they pay you to take out of the store.  Laundry detergent for 75% off retail.  Free over the counter medication.  There are so many good deals to be had at the drugstores if you look.

CVS has the easiest rewards program to understand.  It's called the ExtraCare program, and the rewards are ExtraCare Bucks, or ECBs for short.  The most common way to earn ECBs is to buy items marked in the store or in the sale ad that have a listed ECB.  The simplist way to work the ExtraCare program is to grab the weekly circular and see what's free or nearly free after ECBs.  If you never bought a Sunday paper or printed an internet coupon, you could supply an average family with  free toothpaste indefinitely just by picking it up every time it's free after ECBs.

Here's how it works:  You buy something that generates ECBs.  You pay for it, and walk out the store with ECBs in hand.  ECBs are good towards your next order, though they can't be used to cover the sales tax.  Next week, you go back to CVS and buy something else that generates ECBs.  You pay with your ECBs, keeping your out of pocket expenses low.  Repeat.  The process of using ECBs to get stuff and more ECBs is called "rolling" ECBs.

It might not seem like much, but if all you do is pick up 2 tubes of free toothpaste a month that you would otherwise pay $3.50 each for, you're freeing $7 a month from the "Out" column on the budget.  That's $84 a year.

If your family uses 1 liter of mouthwash a month, and you avail yourself of the free/cheap after ECB mouthwash at CVS every month, instead of paying $5 a month for mouthwash you can pay, on average, $1 a month without ever clipping a coupon.  If you pay extra attention and buy the sale limit when it's free, you might never pay for mouthwash again.  So now you're saving another $4 a month, without clipping coupons.  It still may not seem like much, but you're now saving $132 a year.

Lots of other stuff is free after ECB pretty regularly enough too.  Eye drops, for example, are free after ECB on occasion.  Now, maybe you don't need eye drops this week.  That's OK.  I'm of the opinion that anything I can get that will keep long enough to be used that can be gotten for free should come home with me.  I get eye drops when they're free after ECB.  Last week, my husband had a horrible case of dry eyes.  He wanted me to run out to the store to buy eye drops.  I just smiled.  He's a smart boy, and he asked "do you have a coupon?"  Better, I have a couple of bottles of eye drops I picked up absolutely free from CVS during a past sale.  If I hadn't picked up eye drops when they were free, I would have had to go out and buy them.  Cheap eye drops are around $4.  A little foresight saved me $4.

Contact lense solution, cough syrup, heartburn relief, fiber laxatives, all of these things are in my medicine cabinet, and I got them all playing the drugstore game for free.  Some of them were money makers with the addition of a clipped coupon, but all of them were free on their own.

I may not meet all my family's OTC needs with freebies, and you might not meet your's, but an average person, NOT clipping coupons, can get several hundred dollars worth of stuff every year absolutely free for 2 minutes research a week and a trip to the right drugstore.  No coupon clipping required!

In addition to picking up the freebies, I'd highly recommend getting a Green Bag Tag and tacking it on to the reuseable bag of your choosing.  Bring your own bag, get your Green Bag Tag scanned, and for every four scans (limit one scan per day) you get $1 ECB.  It doesn't matter if all you've been grabbing is the freebies, you earn ECBs just by bringing your own bag.  Green Bag Tags cost 99 cents, and pay for themselves really quickly.

You also earn ECBs based on a percentage of your spending in the calendar quarter.  Since the goal is to roll ECBs and not really spend anything, don't be terribly surprised to not get much for a quarterly ECB.

And if you have prescriptions, you can earn ECBs by having them filled at CVS.

CVS has a Beauty Club, where you earn $5 ECB after you spend $50 on beauty products, and you get a $3 bonus ECB on for your birthday, and they have a Diabetes Care program too.

Feel free to look up the program specifics over at the CVS website.

Having a plan: The Budget

Being frugal is a life path, not a destination.  For any good journey, it helps to have a map.  The budget is the first, and the biggest, plan I draft every month.  Knowing where the money is going before it arrives helps keep priorities in order.

I have a spreadsheet with rows for all the regular monthly bills like the mortgage, water, electric, and car insurance.  Most of these bills stay the same month to month, some of them vary slightly.  For those that vary, I assign a higher amount than I anticipate the bill being in my spreadsheet until the bill actually arrives.  For example, our water bill is between $20 and $25 most months.  Until the bill arrives, spreadsheets for coming months all have $30 listed for the water bill.

It may not seem like much, but a small cushion can be a big help, and the lack of one can lead to disaster.

What to do with your cushion, should you not need to use it, is up to you.  What I'll be doing with mine is a whole other post.

It's more than just being cheap

Cheap and frugal aren't the same thing.  Really, they aren't.  Someone who is cheap walks through the produce section and settles on the clearance package of tomatoes, bruised, soon to be past edible, likely to start molding.  A frugal person walks through the produce section, is floored by the price of heirloom organic tomatoes and resolves to grow their own.

The cheap shopper has done himself no service in choosing poor quality product.  Nutritionally, culinarily, their choice was lacking.

The frugal shopper, now resolved to be a frugal gardener, while not guaranteed success, has a fair shot of spending less on tomatoes all year than their cheap counterpart.  They will get rewarded in spades (gardening pun intended) for doing it better for less.

That's what it's all about.  Getting more, getting better, getting high quality at a low cost.

Hello, I'm Sam

.....and I'm a frugalista.  I have been a saver and a serious bargain shopper since I was a kid.  I've had ups and downs, financially.  My inner frugal ninja has helped me weather every storm (even when some of those storms were of my own making courtesy of bad choices when I was young).  I shop the sales and stockpile, and I have ever since I first had to start buying my own groceries.

I used to clip coupons long ago, before there was really much of an internet.  It was tedious, all the clipping, sorting, filing, searching the sale ads.  Knowing I had a coupon that would match up with the sale I saw, only to dig it out of my file to find it had expired really wasn't fun.  That happened a lot because flipping through all those coupons to weed out the expired ones was not how I wanted to spend a fine weekend afternoon.  After a couple of years I decided it was too much work and that my time was better spent doing other things.  I always shopped the sales, stocked up on the lowest prices, so the financial hit wasn't all that hard.

That worked reasonably well for many years, until last summer.  We had an unexpected car repair ($3k transmission rebuild for a two year old car) that necessitated reworking the budget to find the money.  Most of the wiggle room was in our grocery budget.  Since we had a good stockpile, I didn't worry too badly about continuing to eat.

I spent 4 months with less than $50 a month to buy groceries for my family.  Near the end of that time, I gave birth to child #4.  With the prospect of paying for diapers, no budget with which to buy them, and no better ideas on how to stretch our paper thin budget just a little thinner, I turned to couponing again.

I've been couponing again for just over 6 months, and I'm hooked.  The internet makes it all so much easier.

In the part of the country I live in, all the stores have rules and restrictions on the use of coupons.  You can't really find that one awesome deal, swoop in and clear the shelves.  They've tailored their coupon policies to prevent that, and that's OK.  I'm not above developing a shopping addiction and becoming a slave to a good deal, but with the coupon policies in place near me it would be almost impossible to escalate to that level of obsession.  I suppose it could be done, but not without a fair amount of effort.  My time, like my money, is valuable to me.  It doesn't make sense to me to spend my time trying to figure out how to spend more money when we get along just fine with the current restrictions.