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.
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