Category Archives: Couponing & Saving

Nov 18 2011

Thanksgiving Shopping – Round 2

Yesterday I posted about the start of my Thanksgiving shopping.  It continued on Thursday with my early trip to Shop N Save for $10 off $50 Thursday. 

Apparently everyone else had the same idea I did since it’s the week before Thanksgiving!  The store was definitely a bit more crowded at 7am than usual, but I was still able to get in and out in about 30 minutes – enough time to get home, put everything away, and leave for work by 8am. I’m not Superman; I just happen to live less than a mile from the grocery store!

On these days at SnS, my plan is always to buy only $50 worth and try to limit myself to only items that I have a coupon for as well.  Here are a few of the Thanksgiving items that I picked up, all on sale, which I also had coupons for:

Aluminum Foil $2.98 (.50 cent coupon)
Turkey Ove Bags $2.00 (.50 cent coupon)
Libby’s Green Beans .67 cents each ($1.00 coupon off 4 cans)
Campbell’s Mushroom Soup .75 cents each (.25 cents coupon off 4 cans)
Swanson Broth .58 cents each (.50 cents coupon off 4 cans)
Pam Cooking Spray $2.50 (.75 cents coupon)
Keebler Pie Crusts $1.50 each ($1.00 coupon off 3)
King’s Hawaiian Rolls $2.50 each ($1.00 coupon off 2)
Country Crock Mashed Potatos $2.98 each ($1.00 coupon off 2)

I also picked up 16 Yoplait Yogurts at .64 cents each and 2 coupons for a total of $1.40 off.

Along with this a just a few other non-sale items which I didn’t have coupons for, I spent $40.80 total.  I saved the $10.00 off $50, had $7.00 total in coupons, and saved an additional $13.23 from sale items for a total of $30.23 saved. I don’t usually count the sale portion in my coupon total for the year, but I will be adding the other $17.00 to it!

This brings my Thanksgiving savings to a total of $38.46 though!

No turkey you ask?  Don’t fret.  I will tell you tomorrow where the turkey is coming from and who has the best deal!

Nov 17 2011

WAGs World! Party Time! Excellent!

I started my Thanksgiving shopping on Wednesday!  Have you started?  This consisted of spending about 30 minutes on Tuesday night searching the ads to see who had the best deals on things I needed.  And I also spent time clipping and organizing coupons.

I have a stack of coupons for the grocery store, which I plan to hit tomorrow because my local Shop N Save is having $10 Thursday (Spend $50 and get $10 off).  I usually go in and buy only items I have coupons for and which will total up to $50, and then I get out of there!  I’m hoping to save at at least an extra $10 in coupons alone tomorrow.

I also have a stack of coupons for Target this year.  Believe it or not, now that they are carrying groceries they do have a few items with better prices than the other places.  But I’m not going to tell you what they are!

Today I grabbed the stack for Walgreens and made a special trip in before heading to work. Here’s what I bought:

1 4.5 oz. box of Cheezits at .79 cents on sale

1 10 oz. box of Wheat Thins $2.99 on sale

1 9.5 oz. box of Tricuits $2.01 on sale

2 Boxes of Keebler Club Crackers $2.50 each on sale

2 Cans of Emerald Almonds $5.99 on sale/and buy one get one free

2 Boxes of Ziploc Bags $2.00 each on sale

2 French’s Onions $1.99 each on sale

I had coupons for all of these products, including a WAGs coupon for the onions and 2 coupons from the Sunday paper for the onions as well.  Since I had to buy 2 of some items to satisfy my coupon, that helped equal out the number of coupons I had so I could save more on the onions. At Walgreens, you can’t have more coupons than the number of items you have.

Here’s what I saved:
.98 cent WAGS coupon
$15.73 from sales
$4.75 in regular coupons
_________________________
$21.46 total saved

I spent just $20.08! So, I actually saved more than I spent! I love it when that happens.

What specials are you taking advantage of for Thanksgiving? In 2008, this was the time of year I started couponing and it’s what convinced me to keep doing it!

Nov 9 2011

WAGs World! More Coupons Savings at Walgreens…

Big savings already this month at Walgreens thanks to a lot of specials!  If you don’t clip coupons already, you should definitely start now.  There will be lots of good deals in the coupon inserts over the next three Sundays because of Thanksgiving coming up.  This past Sunday I worked out five total transactions at Walgreens alone, all with coupons, sales, and register rewards coming into play.  Here’s how I did:

Transaction #1:
3 Vitamin Waters $1.00 each on sale
Crest Toothpaste $1.99 on sale
I used a .50 cent coupon off the Crest and earned a $2 Register Reward from the water. I paid $4.78, saved $3.00 from sales/coupons, and had the $2 RR to carry over.

Transaction #2:
3 Vitamin Waters $1.00 each on sale
2 Oral B Toothbrushes $1.99 on sale
I used a .75 cent coupon off the toothbrushes and earned another 42.00 Register Reward from the water. I paid $6.67, saved $4.25 from sales/coupons, and had another $2 RR to carry over.

Transaction #3:
Nyquil/Dayquil Combo Pack $9.99 on sale
4 Sobe Waters $1.49 each
I used a $1.00 coupon off the Nyquil and another $1.00 off 4 for the Sobes. I also used $4 in Register Rewards earned from the previous purchases. I paid $10.40, saved $11.00 total from sales/coupons, and earned another $2.00 RR back from the Nyquil.

Transaction #4:
2 Cottonelle Fresh Wipes $3.99 each
1 Purell $2.99 on sale
2 Morton Salts $1.19 each
2 Eagle Brand Milks $1.99 each on sale
4 Sobe Waters $1.49 each
I used a WAGs coupon on the Cottonelle making them 2/$4 ($3.98 savings), plus a .50 cent coupon off Cottonelle from the Sunday paper, a $1 WAGs coupon off the Purell, a $1.00 coupon off the Purell from the Sunday paper, a $1 coupon off the Sobe, a WAGs coupon for the Salt making them 2/$1, a $1.00 coupon on the Eagle Brand from the Sunday paper, and I used a $2.00 RR. I spent just $11.96 total. I saved $16.86 in coupons/sales.

Transaction #5:
3 Pepsi 12 Packs $4.00 each on sale
1 Diet Pepsi 12 Pack $4.00 on sale
1 32 oz. of Nice Honey $8.99
1 Folgers 11 oz. Coffee $3.49 on sale
Viva Paper Towels 6 Roll $6.99
I used a WAGs free coupon for the Diet Pepsi, a WAGs coupon the honey to save $4.50, a WAGs $1.00 coupon off the Viva, and a $1.00 Sunday paper coupon for the Viva, a $1.00 coupon from the Sunday paper for the Folgers, and my last $2 RR. I spent $23.01 and saved a total of $20.96 from coupons/sales.

Remember, you can use double coupons for an item (1 from Walgreens and 1 from the Sunday paper) as long as you don’t have more items than you do number of coupons.  For example, I doubled my savings on the Purell, Viva, and Cottonelle by having a Walgreens coupon for them and a coupon from the Sunday paper.  Coupons that require you to buy more than 1 item help add on the extra items so that you can use other extra coupons.

Total Spent: $56.82
Total Saved from Coupons and Sales: $56.07

And adding that to my total for the year, I’m not just over $1000.00 saved in coupons for 2011!

Nov 8 2011

It’s Tuesday Morning!

We hit a couple of Tuesday Morning stores this past weekend, one of my favorite places to shop.  I love this time of year because they always have nice Christmas decorations.  I have bought many a Santa ornament there the past few years on sale after the holidays.  We didn’t pick up any Christmas items this time, but I did spot a few things I wanted!

Instead, we bought a new quilt for the twin bed in the spare room for just $40.

We also picked up six new coffee mugs.  They are a tad bit taller, almost like latte mugs.  It gave us a chance to retire some of our old mugs that we’ve collected over time.

And the biggest surprise was three Dean Koontz books on audio, which J got for me for an early Christmas gift!  I like audio books but they are so expensive.  I had purchased a few for my iPod, but I’m not able to listen to it while driving because my car doesn’t have an outlet to plug it in.  These books on CD were just $9.99 each, regularly $40 to $45 each if you paid full price!  I wonder if they came from an old Borders closeout?

Nov 1 2011

October Coupon Recap

October was a great month for coupons for me and really helped increase my yearly total.  I expect next month will be even higher thanks to all the Thanksgiving related coupons that will be in the papers the next few Sundays.  You might remember that Thanksgiving shopping is what got me started couponing a few years ago.

For now, here’s a recap of what I saved in October:

Walgreens: $74.32

Yep, took a huge advantage of lots of coupons and specials at Walgreens this month.  I saved $54 of that alone this week from buying candy and stocking up on laundry supplies!  Honestly, I probably don’t need laundry detergent for another 3 months thanks to these deals.

Shop N Save: $27.52

Nothing special here or out of the norm. Shop N Save was leading for the year with the most saved there, but Walgreens is quickly catching up.

Gas: $1.99

Those .9 cents off per gallon coupons at SNS really help!  I’ve saved almost $14.00 in gas for the year!

Wal-Mart: $4.90

Haven’t shopped at Wal-Mart in months, but decided to buy groceries there a few weeks ago when the family came in town to visit.

PetSmart: $12.00

Loved this bargain this month.  I had a coupon for $8 off the 30 lb bag of dog food (which is normally $40), and with my PetSmart card I saved an additional $4.00.

Restaurants: $13.07

$3.07 of this is from those Money Mailers you get in the mail, and $10.00 was a free gift card to Chilis that we had earned.

That brings October’s total to $133.80!  I hope to reach $150 in November!

And my total for the year is $942.22!  That’s just $257.80 shy of my goal for the year of $1200.00.

Oct 2 2011

September Coupon Recap

September wasn’t a bad month for me as far as couponing goes.  Here’s a quick breakdown of how much I saved:

Walgreens $45.22

Haircut $3.00

Shop N Save $22.05

Gas $2.51

Jiffy Lube $20.00

Off The Grill $2.00

That’s a total of $94.78 for September and brings my yearly total to $808.42.

The Jiffy Lube early bird special really helped out this month, and I was surprised I did more at Walgreens than the grocery store this time.  But, I have started counting Walgreens savings from sales – not just my coupons – because a lot of the savings from sales combined with my coupons really drives the price down.

I don’t know if I’m going to reach my goal of $1200 by year end.  Even if I average $100 per month in savings for the next three months, I’m still $100 short.  But there will be extra shopping to do for Thanksgiving so that should help out a bit.

Sep 8 2011

Reduce, REUSE, Recycle

Ever since our neighborhood gave us recycling bins about a year ago, I’ve become very good at making sure all paper, cardboard, plastic, and glass end up in that bin.  Sometimes we only have one bag of actual trash in a week’s time, compared to the 3 or 4 bags we probably had in the past.  It makes me feel really good to throw large pieces like the laundry detergent bottle or a cardboard box in the recycle bin.  Heck, I even throw in junk mail, old newspapers, and the empty toilet paper roll.

So, now I’ve been trying to give some thought to that REUSE part.  You might remember my post earlier in the Spring where I planted herbs in plastic Folgers coffee containers and sat them on my windowsill.  What are ways you are reusing?

J and I have collected wine bottle corks for about the whole 8 years we’ve been together.  My intentions were to glue them together one day to make a wreath.  But J came up with the idea of using some of the larger ones as drawer pulls in our kitchen.  Great REUSE idea!

For years, I also collected our used wooden chopsticks from Chinese take out.  I stopped a while back, but have quite a little lumber yard of them built up now.  Still trying to figure out what to do with those.  Any ideas?

What are you doing to do your part?

Sep 2 2011

August Coupon Recap

It’s been a while since I posted anything about my couponing adventures, so I thought I’d recap August.

My total savings for the year in coupons is $713.  For August alone, I saved $43.03.

$17.30 of that was at Shop N Save.

$9.19 at Walgreens.

$7.00 at Dollar General.  I made two trips to DG this month and while the coupon savings might not be much they are definitely cheaper on products I pick up there, more so than Walgreens or the grocery stores.

$5.00 from my haircut – a regular coupon that I always look forward to using each month when I get one.

$3.19 in gas at Shop N Save thanks to their 9 cent of each gallon coupon each time you spend $100 or more on groceries.

$2.05 at Target, and $2.00 at Off The Grill.

My goal was to reach $1200 in savings again this year.  That’s another $500 to go.  I don’t think I’m going to make it, but I’m okay with that.  Less coupon usage has actually equaled less money spent overall in groceries thanks to my smarter eating and weight loss this year.  So, can’t complain there!

Jul 6 2011

Hardcover King Update

Okay, okay, call it a sick obsession if you must!  Remember my post about collecting Stephen King books in hardcover?  I’ve gotten really lucky and landed most of them for free through Bookmooch.  But, man oh man, I’ve had more difficulty getting these books from there more than any other book before.  People are canceling the requests on me, or they just aren’t responding. I’ve never had this much trouble with Bookmooch before. As of right now, I still have 11 books waiting to receive from Bookmooch, and only three of those have responded and said they’d send.

So, I decided to start buying them.  Last Friday, a trip to Dunaway Books in the Tower Grove area with a $20 Living Social Gift Certificate in hand landed me a hardcover edition of The Bachman Books and a copy of Blaze.  I wasn’t happy with the $35 bucks I still paid out of pocket after my $20 credit, but oh well.  I didn’t stop there.  I decided to hit A-1 Books again which is closest to my house and see what they had to offer in the way of hardcover King.  And I’m so glad I did!  I picked up 3 more books here including a hardcover of Pet Semetary, and A-1 has many more that I’ll be back to get to build the collection.

If I have to, I could break down and buy some of them pretty cheap from used book sellers at Amazon.  The only problem with this is that sometimes these copies don’t have their dust jacket and I would prefer to have them.

The Obsession

Sick obsession?  Yeah, maybe, but I’m having fun with this.  So much fun that I found a list online of all the King books which I printed out and have been checking off as I get them.  Oh what the heck, here’s the list with the copies I currently have highlighted in red…

1980 – Firestarter
1981 – Cujo
1981 – Danse Macabre (nonfiction about horror)
1982 – Creepshow (comic book, illustrated by Bernie Wrightson)
1982 – The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger  My copy is paperback; not sure hardcover exists, but it is the early copy I owned years ago with the nice artwork inside.
1982 – Different Seasons (novellas)
1983 - Christine
1983 – Pet Sematary
1983 – Cycle of the Werewolf
1984 – The Talisman (written with Peter Straub)
1985 – Skeleton Crew (stories)
1985 - The Bachman Books (novel collection)
1986 – It
1987 – The Eyes of the Dragon
1987 – Misery
1987 – The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three
1988 – The Tommyknockers
1988 – Nightmares in the Sky (Photo book with text by King)
1988 – Dark Visions
1989 – The Dark Half
1990 – The Stand: The Complete & Uncut Edition
1990 – Four Past Midnight (stories)  My copy doesn’t have a dust jacket so I may end up replacing it.
1991 - Needful Things
1991 – The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands
1992 – Gerald’s Game
1993 – Dolores Claiborne
1993 – Nightmares & Dreamscapes (stories)
1994 – Insomnia
1995 – Rose Madder
1996 – The Green Mile (originally published as a monthly serial consisting of six parts: The Two Dead Girls, The Mouse on the Mile, Coffey’s Hands, The Bad Death of Eduard Delacroix, Night Journey, and Coffey on the Mile)
1996 – Desperation
1997 – Six Stories (stories)
1997 – The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass
1998 – Bag of Bones
1999 – Storm of the Century
1999 - The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
1999 – Hearts in Atlantis
2000 – Riding the Bullet (electronically published novella)
2000 – The Plant(electronically published)
2000 – On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (nonfiction autobiography)  Mine is paperback, the only book I still had of King’s prior to starting this collection.
2000 – Dreamcatcher
2001 – Black House (written with Peter Straub)
2002 – From a Buick 8
2002 – Everything’s Eventual: 14 Dark Tales
2003 – The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla
2004 – The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah
2004 – The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower
2004 – Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season
2005 – The Colorado Kid
2006 – Cell
2006 - Lisey’s Story
2008 – Duma Key  Mine is paperback, an early mooch that I’m going to replace.  Found a hardcover of it at A-1.
2008 – Just After Sunset
2009 – Stephen King Goes to the Movies
2009 – UR (e-novella available only on Amazon.com’s Kindle)
2009 – Under the Dome
2010 – Blockade Billy
2010 – Full Dark, No Stars

Richard Bachman’s Published Books:
“Richard Bachman” is a pseudonym that King used until Bachman’s true identity was discovered by fans, after which he only published one more Bachman novel.

1977 – Rage
1979 – The Long Walk
1981 – Road Work
1982 – The Running Man
1984 – Thinner
1996 – The Regulators
2007 – Blaze

A-1 has a hardcover copy of The Talisman, Four Past Midnight (with dustjacket), Duma Key, The Tommyknockers, and Storm of the Century, so I will be making a trip back to get those. By the way, the three books I got at A-1 only cost me $21.  So, I’ve invested a total of $52.23 in this project so far. Not bad if you consider that a hardcover copy of The Dome, King’s latest, retails for $35.  Now, the regular going rate for a hard cover book is probably more around $24.95 or so.  Take that and multiply it by how many books I’ve racked up so far and you get close to $500!  I should totally count that savings in my coupon total for the year!!

More to follow on this as my journey into King collecting continues….

Jun 30 2011

Coupon Recap For June

I know I haven’t been mentioning it much thanks to all my gardening posts, but yes, I am still religiously couponing!  Here’s a recap of how I did for June and where I am for the year.

Thanks to dieting I’m actually spending less in groceries all together.  And my coupon organizer is getting pretty thin because I haven’t bought a Sunday paper in months.  My boss has been bringing me her coupon inserts week to week, which is working out fine because I’m still finding savings on the items I do buy on a regular basis.

For June, I saved just $4.30 at Walgreens.

I saved $3.00 at Petco on DogFood thanks to a coupon I received in the mail.

I saved $15.61 at Target.  Remember my grocery trip to Target a few weeks ago?  I plan on doing that again really soon.

I saved $1.37 in gas thanks to those Shop N Save coupons for gas and if you buy a carwash at the pump at my local Shell you also save so much off per gallon.

And the big winner this month was Shop N Save again with $76.52 in coupon savings.  This includes two trips in on the $10 off $50 Thursday two weeks ago. And also includes a deal I did yesterday where if you bought $30 in certain P&G products, you got a $15 iTunes Gift Card. I had a ton of P&G coupons that were going to expire today so I saved even more there.

My total for the year in Coupon Savings is $517.96.  Since half the year is gone, I’m halfway to $1K.  That’s not quite my goal for the year of $1500.00 but who knows what will happen.  I’ll still be happy with reaching 1K again.

So, where are you saving money or how are you doing with your coupons this year?