Overview Guide to My Moneysaving Techniques

I just gave my little workshop on saving money on groceries and household needs, to a rowdy audience of two. It looked a lot like the Capitol mall in there. Fortunately, we were able to wrap up in time to see our new President get sworn in and hear his inaugural address. I guess we missed Aretha Franklin bringing down the house with "America the Beautiful," which is hands down my favorite patriotic song. I will have to catch that online. (I later found out that the radio commentators I heard got it dead wrong; she sang "My Country Tis of Thee." I was disappointed since I love "America the Beautiful.")


Anyway, since I had written up a presentation to share my deep and wide knowledge of budget shopping, I thought I would share it here with you. The following is a summary of what I have learned in a year of a budget shopping, broken up into categories: strategic shopping, couponing, special grocery deals (Catalinas), and drugstore programs. Here goes:


Looking over your expenditures each month at the grocery store, Target, Costco etc. can be overwhelming. You know you want to spend less, but change is scary – will I end up spending hours driving around to get deals and clipping coupons? Will my family revolt if I don’t buy the same things I always do? And yet, groceries and household items are one of the best budget areas to save because you have the most control and choice over this category – you may not be able to control how much gas you use or your heating bill but you can control this. There are a whole range of methods to attack your monthly spending, and some involve more time investment than others. I'm going to cover them from the smallest time investment to the largest.


The other factor that I think is important when deciding what actions to take is how much you like or dislike the activity. For instance – for me, using coupons and CVS ExtraBucks to get stuff for free is like entertainment, it’s a game. But for others, it would seem unbearably annoying and trivial. On the other hand, most budget shoppers swear by having a weekly written menu before they shop, but that just wouldn’t suit my personality. (More on this: “Follow Your Frugal Bliss.”)


As I share these basic strategies for saving money, and I want you to look at them as options to try, depending on your personality, how much time you have available, etc. I wouldn’t go crazy and implement them all at once. When you try a strategy, give it at least a couple of weeks before you assess whether it’s working for you, and especially whether it’s taking too much time. I have found that I did spend a lot of time in the first few weeks, EVEN MONTHS, of most of the strategies I now use, but now that I have been intensively bargain shopping for a year, they are routine for me, and especially now that I have used them to build up a good stockpile of non-perishables in my pantry, they are not sucking up too much of my time. I’d like to cut the time down more, and I think I will be able to. I’ll talk more about time management later.


And before we get to the nitty gritty, a word about self-image and spending money. Personally I think the most effective thing you can do to stop overspending is not using a coupon or hunting for a sale; it’s severing the emotional connection you have between what you buy and who you are. I used to look at a sparsely stocked fridge and feel like, we’re not providing a good home for our children, or we work hard, we’re professionals, we should have whatever treats we want in there. And, if I’m not serving meat every night, I’m being some kind of crazy miser. But in reality, if I am overspending on groceries and therefore dipping into my savings or not saving for my kids’ education, how is that being a good parent? And cutting back on meat dishes has actually allowed me to serve more organic produce and hormone, antibiotic-free meat – it wasn’t the kind of deprivation I thought it would be.


Money-saving Methods


A. BUDGETING AND STRATEGICALLY SHOPPING.


You’d be surprised how much you can cut from your budget without using coupons or anything. The main strategies I use: setting and sticking to a budget, reading the grocery flyers and being flexible about which store I go to, basing my menu on the sales, using store brands, getting to know the prices and working on a pricebook, and stockpiling.


Helpful Web sites for strategic shopping: Shoplifting With Permission, Money Saving Mom, The Grocery Game.


B. COUPONS.


They have a certain reputation and emotional baggage – when I first started heavily using coupons, I felt like I’d skipped about 50 years and turned into my grandma. Without careful thought, coupons can actually lead you to spend more by leading you to brand names instead of store brands. But used judiciously, they can help you save a lot and can also lead to occasional freebies.


Coupons are crucial to a another strategy I’ll discuss – using the drugstore loyalty programs to get free stuff. Some tips for actually saving money with coupons: save them until the item is at what you know is as low as it goes, then buy as many as you have coupons for; use them on clearance items; use TWO COUPONS on buy-1-get-1 items for serious savings (For example I recently had a bunch of $1 off any Wild Harvest organic item at Jewel, printed from the Internet. For several weeks they had their whole grain pasta on sale bogo at $2.29 for 16 oz., so every time I went in, I used two coupons and got them BOTH for 29 cents! )


Another great coupon technique: STACKING. Most people don’t realize that most stores allow you to combine store coupons and manufacturers’ coupons – up to one of each variety per item. Stores that frequently put out their own coupons include CVS, Walgreens, Target (get them in the mail, online or I think even print them out at the registry terminals in store) and Dominick’s (in the Sunday flyer). Generally any store will let you use one store coupon and one manufacturer’s coupon per item. At CVS, you can use those two coupons per item, PLUS a coupon that affects the whole transaction price, like the $3/$15.

Coupon organization strategies: Basically there are two approaches – clip coupons and carry them around in a file, or just save your inserts and don’t clip them until you’re ready to buy something. If you’re a clipper, you might just look quickly through the Sunday flyers and clipping coupons for only things you know you’ll use or only high value coupons. Other people clip every single coupon because they figure you never know what item is going to turn up in the clearance cart and end up being free after the coupon. The method I use: Clip almost NOTHING. File away each insert, then when I look at each week’s flyers and decide what I want to buy, I use an online database – Hot Coupon World – to look up if there are any coupons for that item and when it appeared. The nice thing about doing it this way is that the sites will also tell you if there are any online coupons for the item and where to find them.




Where to get coupons: Obviously Sunday papers (I get my parents and grandparents to save their coupons for me too); Menards and those guys on the street sell Sunday papers for $1.25 so if we’re there anyway on a weekend I’ll pick up four or five extras. Some people Dumpster dive to find more Sunday inserts. The Internet – Coupons.com, Boodle.com, Smartsource.com. (Not all stores accept Internet printables). Sometimes they’re on the Web site of the company offering the coupon, in that case you can find out through one of the Web sites listed on the sheet. Oh, also on MY WEBSITE every week I list what I see is the best deals for the local stores – Jewel, Dominick’s and Fair Share Supermarket down on Roosevelt – and I include coupon matchups with where you can find them. Other coupon sources: those little blinkie boxes in the store, on product boxes, All You magazine, and buying coupons from clipping services and on EBay. Buying coupons may sound extreme – I haven’t done it -- but some people feel it’s the best way especially if you want to stock up big on a lot of the same item. You don’t have to spend any time clipping. But you do have to plan ahead by looking up, say, what is going to go on sale at CVS in future weeks or months. Here is a list of places where coupons are sold.


C. Special grocery promotions – Catalinas.



See this picture?







I paid less than $15 for these groceries. That includes:

12 Yogurt multipacks (6-8 count), 10 bags Chex and Cheerios Mix, 3 boxes Cheerios w/ $1.50 Pampers coupons, 5 boxes Total, 3 boxes Golden Grahams,12 boxes Progresso broth, 15 cans Progresso soup, 3 cake mixes, 2 Breyers ice cream, 2 Lipton Green Tea, 5 Lipton Pyramid Tea, 2 Frosting, 4 Salad Dressings, 8 boxes micro popcorn, 1 bag Totinos pizza rolls, 5 boxes Macaroni Grill, 3 boxes Lipton onion soup mix (for chip dip!), 6 bags various Green Giant frozen veggies

The regular prices for all this add up to $300. How in the heck did I do that?

By doing a Catalina deal offered at Jewel, but by doing it with a twist: When you see in the flyer that if you spend at least $30 on certain items, you get $15 in coupons toward your next purchase. This would appear to be half off, which is already pretty good since the items in the promo are usually also on sale. The secret: At least at Jewel, the $30 you have to “spend” is based on the register price NOT THE SALE PRICE. Add in coupons, and you are getting an incredible deal. In fact, on some transactions I have been able to spend less than $15, and then get $15 in coupons, so I’ve actually made money buying food. Then if you “roll” those coupons to do the deal again, you might get another $30 worth of food plus $15 in coupons spending only $3 or $5 more. This is the reason I have 30 boxes of cereal in my pantry right now.
WARNINGS: This is something you should read up on before attempting, so I’ll give you a couple links at the end. I found out about this method online, but at the store, they will always tell you that you have to spend $30 out of pocket to get the coupons. So if the deal doesn’t work – and there are a lot of reasons the coupons fail to print, like the machine runs out of paper, you miscalculated, who knows – the staff is not going to help you. Then you have to return the stuff and try again, and you might have trouble doing that if you rolled your coupons, because a lot of times they won’t want to give you back the coupons you just spent. I’d advise that if you try these deals the super-cheap way, just accept that it won’t work every single time, or don’t roll the coupons so you can return your items if you need to redo it.
D. CVS and Walgreens – playing the drugstore “game”
I live very close to a CVS, and yet for the first 6 months we lived here I scarcely bought anything there because I thought those places were a rip-off. I’d drive to Target twice a month and spend $300 on paper towels, diapers, toothpaste, and a lot of impulse buys since I was there. Now I go to Target maybe every 3 months, and when I do I don’t buy any toiletries, toilet paper, etc. I get all of that at CVS, and I only spend a few dollars a week there – mostly in tax.
How is this possible? I learned about CVS’ ExtraCare program – you might see in their flyer or in the store that certain items say, “buy this for $3.99 and get $2 ExtraBucks” or sometimes even “free after ExtraBucks.” What I never would have imagined is that it’s possible to earn more ExtraBucks than you’re spending, so eventually you just have a pool of ExtraBucks that you use to get all your household needs. Playing the drugstore game is admittedly the nerdiest form of bargain shopping, and it can be more time consuming, and it takes a certain amount of nerve to walk into a CVS with a stack of coupons -- but the payoff is bigger than other bargain shopping strategies. I’m going to explain a little bit about it here, and I’m also providing you with a link to online primers that explain all about the CVS program and the Walgreen’s program (theirs is a combination between “Register Rewards,” which print out at the register, and rebates that you apply for online and can receive in the form of a gift card or a check).
I’ll focus on CVS because that’s the program I use the most. What’s the secret to getting more ExtraBucks than you have spend? Coupons. For example, makeup companies often put coupons for as much as $3 off in the Sunday flyers. So if the CVS flyer has a Maybelline lipstick at $6.99, get $6.99 ExtraBucks, and you walk in there with a $3 coupon, you just EARNED $3. You spend $4 out of pocket, you get the lipstick AND a $6.99 ExtraBucks (ECB) slip to spend on whatever you want. If you want to keep it going, you should spend it on something that also pays ExtraBucks.
Often, CVS itself issues coupons that will sweeten the deal even further. For example, they will publish a coupon for $3 off any $15 purchase or $4 off a $20 purchase. So if you combined your $7 lipstick purchase with an two $4 items that paid $2 ExtraBucks each, your total before coupons would be $15. But if you used a $3/$15 coupon, your total would be down to $12. Then if you had that manufacturer’s coupon from the Sunday paper for the lipstick, it would be down to $9. So then you’d be spending $9 and getting $11 back. CVS also sometimes prints such coupons out at the register at the end of your receipt, or from these little coupon terminals they have in the store, where you scan your card and it spits out coupons. These terminals usually also spit out store coupons, which CAN BE COMBINED WITH MANUFACTURER’S COUPONS FOR EVEN BETTER SAVINGS. For example, right now I have a coupon for $1 off ANY HAND OR BODY LOTION at CVS. If I also have $1 off coupon for my favorite hand lotion, Neutrogena Norwegian Formula, I can get $2 off the lotion – which costs about $4.
In order to build up your ExtraBucks at first, you’re going to have to buy stuff that you’re not at all interested in. Yesterday I bought this nasal spray because it was free after ExtraBucks, and there was a $2 off coupon online that I printed out.
You might be able to get started without spending much or any cash if you watch the Web sites for a few weeks for a really good deal before you jump in. (My site, IheartCVS.com, Moneysavingmom, Slickdeals.net). For instance, I spent all my ExtraBucks at Christmastime, so last week I was looking for a way to get back in the game. I looked on IheartCVS.com and found a “hidden deal”: CVS was offering Glade Plug-Ins for about $5.50, and you get $2 ExtraBucks back. Not that good of a deal. BUT – there was one kind of Plug-In that a lot of stores put on Clearance for just 99 cents. Now, you’d pay 99 cents and get $2. AND, IheartCVS linked to a coupon that I printed out for $2 off any Glade Plug-In. So, I found a store with 10 of those Plug-Ins on clearance, used five $2 off coupons, paid only the tax, and got $20 ExtraBucks for pretty much nothing. I gave the Plug-Ins to my grandma, who was thrilled.
By the way, I have also donated a lot of toiletry items to various charities because of my CVSing. I also gave a cousin who was going off to college an entire laundry basket filled with toiletries, detergent, etc. this summer – all for free or close to it.
If you make mistakes at first, don’t feel bad. You have to get the EXACT ITEM listed and pictured in the flyer in order to get the ExtraBucks. The stores are supposed to label them but the one on Madison doesn’t always have all the labels out.
Drugstore game links:
Money Saving Mom's CVS 101
Money Saving Mom's Walgreen's 101
E. Time management
Like I said before, if you jump in and start scouring the grocery flyers, and clipping coupons, and playing the CVS game, you’re sure to find yourself spending all your free time on this and getting frustrated. But if you try one or two methods, and get good at them, you should find that you spend not much more or even less time shopping than you did before.
IT’S ACTUALLY POSSIBLE TO SAVE TIME BY shopping budget-consciously. How? For one thing, you’ll probably find yourself stockpiling. I recommend it. When I find a good deal on something, now that I know what a good deal IS for most things I buy, I buy as many as I have coupons for. I NEVER run to the store because we are out of cereal or coffee, because I have plenty of both stored away. My weekly budget also discourages me from running to the store because we’re out of something – if I’ve already spent my week’s money, I will just make do with another ingredient. Therefore, although I may be on planned trips about twice a week to two different stores (and if there is a really good deal that requires multiple transactions, there are weeks when I make a quick trip more than once a day), with no impromptu trips it works out about even. With meat and frozen vegetables in the freezer, you will even find that you can skip grocery shopping for a week every few months. For another thing, when you plan your grocery trips based on deals, you will probably shop faster because you’re not staring at the peanut butter choices, trying to figure out which one is less money per ounce. (Personally, since I buy organic peanut butter, I ALWAYS get the Trader Joe’s brand so that one is a no brainer for me.)
Same thing with CVS. In the first 6 months, I definitely spent more time than I normally would have. There were weeks when I was in there (with my kids) every single day, sometimes more than once a day. Now, I have most toiletries on hand already, so there are many weeks when I skip CVSing or just do one quick deal. But I am still not making those drives to Target or Costco to stock up, so that may even be a net time savings.