Category Archives: CVS

Are You Thirsty? Stockpiling

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Today was officially another snow day for us. I was unable to get out of the driveway or up the street as of 10am when I had to make the decision. However, with the temperature being 45 with the sun shine, we were able to venture out to a couple of stores this afternoon.

The items that we purchased are for the stockpile. The first stop was CVS, the last 2 weeks they have been running a special on 2 Liter Diet Cokes. They are on a stock up price of $.99 each, in addition for each $10 spent you receive 5 in ECB. I have been slowing purchasing a couple but decided to finish up today. I purchased 15 Diet Cokes a couple of Sprites and a couple of Cokes for a total of 19 drinks. I did not use any coupons but did use one of the $5 ECB I received.  Total spent $14.97, saved $24.09 or 62%. I also received another 5 ECB to be used later. The total cost per 2 L including tax was $0.79!

The next stop was Food Lion (our local grocery store), I read on Wednesday of an awesome deal. PowerAde and PowerAde Zero are on sale for $0.89 with the purchase of 15 you receive $10 off at the register. The total cost per 32 oz drink including tax is $0.23!    Matt decided he was okay with stocking up. I did a total of 7 transactions which  was the only down side, we ended up purchasing 105 drinks. In addition to the awesome saving this represents, I will earn 3 points from Coke Rewards for each of these bottles which will be 315 point, of which 250 points earns a free 12 pack!

Total Spent $18.55
Total Saved $146.59 or 89%  And I didn’t even use a single coupon!

Brand Loyalty and Coupons

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One of the first things you will read when beginning to coupon or trying to learn more about coupons is that you can’t be brand loyal.  I disagree with this statement. I have discovered over the years, that I am more brand loyal than I would have ever imagined. The things that come to mind are deodorant, laundry detergent, toilet paper and of course Diet Coke. In addition, Matt has used the same razor brand since we got married almost 10 years ago.  This weekend almost all of the above have been needed and on sale so I have spent $93 of my $300 grocery budget on these items.  But most of these should last the rest of the month if not several months

. First of all, let talk about Matt’s razors, I have learned that is it usually cheaper to buy him a whole new “Proglide razor” than purchase the replacement cartilages.  When we travel, he will use disposable ones just to save time. So I usually purchase disposable razors when I find a really good deal( less than $1.00) on them.  I know his preference for razors so if a good deal is running I will buy at least one and stick back, however this morning, he let me know that he was completely out of razors.  I checked my bag and found a rain check so this afternoon he was back in business. I love CVS because their rain checks never run out. I ended up spending $2.00 for his razor of choice!

Next is laundry detergent, I have tried several brands including the Kirkland one but return to Tide because it cleans and does not bother the sensitive skins of Lily or Zach. Tide usually goes on sale once every 3 months or so. I try to stock up but also know that I can grab an ok deal at Costco on Tide if I need to. I feel like the money I spend on Tide is made up with keeping the resale value of the kids clothes in addition to prolonging the life of most of the other clothes.  CVS also had a good deal on Tide so I purchased 4 20 load bottles. This should last until the next sale cycle.  The one exception I make in this area is a general exception across the board, if an item is free and I am shopping that store anyway, then I grab it. One of the black Friday deals at CVS was their brand laundry detergent, I grab both my free bottles. I will use these on our beach trip because I watch swim suits and towels every day or for towel at home. These are nice to have in a pinch as well. if it is free then it is worth one load of laundry.

Following close behind the laundry detergent is toilet paper. We have a really bad septic systems that we have spent several thousand dollars on in the past 4 years.  So I have to be careful what we put in it. I have found that Scott Extra Bath Tissue, first is soft enough to use and then is one of the safest for our system. Luckily, between coupons and sales, I can always find it for $0.45 cent a roll or less. Today, I grabbed it $0.40 cent a roll. In comparison when purchasing from Costco, I end up paying $0.63 a roll for the house brand, I purchased 54 rolls today so I am positive that we will be using them for several months!

Finally deodorant, I have always like Mitchum, luckily I am usually able to purchase for $1.00 or less a bottle I always grab as many as I have coupons for anytime I see them for this price. Matt on the other hand is adventurous in the area. But last year, he discovered “Right Guard” cooling effect. I have been able to stock pile about a 2 year supply so currently unless it is free, we don’t purchase any men’s deodorant!

No Spend Challenge and Shopping.

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One of my goals for this challenge was to reduce our Grocery spending to $400 for the month with  the remaining $200 set aside for Cheerleading competitions.  This is one area that we are doing excellent with. One of the reason is my winter cleaning has left our pantry much more organized and we also developed a list of items we have and need to use up.

I did realize that we were running really low on fresh veggies to use this week. We decided to  make several shopping stops today.  First up was a quick trip to CVS. I purchased 2 tubes of toothpaste, 2 2L of Diet Coke and a candy bar. I ended up paying a total of $1.55 of which $0.60 was tax. I received back 4 ECB. Next, was a stop at Aldi, total spent was $14.88 and finally Walmart. I purchased a baby gift and spent 1.71 for a bunch of celery. We check the celery at Aldi but it was limp and Lily wanted celery and peanut butter one day for lunch.   Our grocery total is $298.63 for the month!

I have a chance to order some items from Pampered Chef this week so I am going to use $100 from the left over grocery budget to pay for these items that are all going to be used for cooking.

This goal is MET!!!!!! So far for the challenge I am 2/5. By the end of the week, I hope to achieve 3/5!! This is huge for me as the challenge goals were set prior to planning of our trip!

 

 

Shopping Trip

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So far this month, I have spent $217.56 on groceries. Yesterday, we went shopping and I have no plans to make another trip this month. I have come to realize that I usually don’t shop like other people. I find it very interesting to read the details about other people’s trips and thought it might be interesting to explain how I do shop. I live in a very small town, which has a Walmart and one grocery store chain. I try to combine trips and usually buy items that are on sale only for most trips. Keep in mind that we currently have 40# of chicken breast, 50# of ground venison, a bag of shrimp and probably 10# of pork in our freezer. At the brand sale earlier in the month, I stocked up on canned goods including beans and veggie as well as staples such as oatmeal, ketchup and mustard.  This month, my focus was stocking up at our local store (Food Lion) brand sale and keeping the grocery bill as low as possible. Any amount left in the budget for the month will definitely help to meet our financial goals for this month.

We did end up shopping at CVS, Food Lion, Harris Teeter and Costco yesterday. The first stop was CVS, I purchased eye patches for Kendall and grabbed the best deals on items that we use.  I spent a total of $13.69 of which $4.59 was the cost of the eye patches. At Harris Teeter, I spent $8.96 for only items on sale that ended up costing less than $1 each they included 4 boxes of Hamburger Helper, 2 boxes of cereals, bottle of shampoo, mousse, 2 bottles of Hair Spray, hair gel, toothpaste, 2 boxes of granola bars  and a  roll of sausage. Costco is the only store that I would actually consider grocery shopping because I purchased items that we were out of  including milk, creamer and eggs. I spent $73 at Costco. The final stop was Food Lion where I had $12.50 in coupons from the previous sale, I ended up grabbing items for our Super Bowl party and spending an additional $14 above the coupons.  The total spent for the day was $105.

Does anyone else shop this way?

 

Productive Weekend

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I was able to get some extra hours off of work this week so I have been planning ahead to get things done this weekend. I am really excited at how much we have managed to accomplish!  I know that the next several weeks will be progressively more busy so I am so glad to feel like I am ahead of the game. Here is a list of thing that we accomplished this weekend:     1. Snow village is total complete!
2.  Christmas decorations are almost complete except for the tree which we will be picking up on Thursday. As a bonus, I have even managed to get some of the boxes back up in the attic
3. I am over 75% complete with Christmas shopping. My goal for this next week is to finish up all that I can  face the dreaded wrapping.
4.  I made an early morning trip to CVS this morning and saved 80%. I will be posting more about this trip on Thursday, when I return to CVS to use up the ECBs that I earned. I always look at these trips as one because I am carrying things forward.
5. We were able to purchase flooring and a new toilet for Lily’s new room. It would be awesome if she actually got to move into her new room on her birthday weekend. But that is a lot of work between now and then!
6. Naps on both days!
7. Finally, we have managed to clean out the fridge so that we can have some really comfort hot meals this week as the weather is too cold for my comfort!

 

Seven Cent Shopping Trip!

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photoI made a quick trip to CVS, Sunday evening. My initial goal was to grab the free paper towels and a stick of my favorite deodorant breaking even in the process. I was very pleasantly surprised to receive 5 ECB from the beauty club when I scanned my card. So I was able to grab the above items for 7 CENT including tax!   I have 2 rolls of paper towel, 2 sticks of Mitcheum deodorant and 2 packs of trident gum!   I am really excited as these are truly items that I normally use and the deodorant is one of the few items that I am brand loyal to!

CVS is slowing down on deals lately but it is trips like this that will keep me going back!

Savings!

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A list of the things we have done or are currently doing to save money :

  1. No heat or air for the past month! The goal is another month or 6 weeks.  The last several days have seen highs in the upper 80s but with low 60s or 50s at night, we have survived with ceiling fans.  I can’t wait to see how much this has effected our power bill.
  2. By switching our cell phone bill to  my name, we increased our discount by 2% and for some reason they applied the discount differently as well. As a result, our total cell phone bill is over $50 less starting in October!
  3. Matt has been researching our cable tv and its charges. We were both really surprised to find $10 charge  for on demand items that we have been paying for over a year that simply we don’t use. In addition, we are planning on dropping our cable tv entirely in the month of November, when our contract is up.  We should see this reduce our monthly bills by $100 a month. We know that the first 2 months will be sent on obtaining boxes but still $100 a month is HUGE!
  4. Matt cut his own hair yesterday. The current decision is that some things are just better left to the pros. Hair cuts being one of them!
  5. We are continuing to clean out our freezers. A major shopping trip is planned for next weekend but we are continuing to eat what we have. A good example is today, for lunch everyone chose a left over for lunch. At dinner, I used left over taco meat and made a taco bake which basically was a free meal!
  6. By combining discounts, I was able to purchase a new comforter set for our bed for less than half of the advertised price including shipping and tax. I will definitely be posting pictures of that after it arrives.
  7. I was able to purchase 3 Diet Cokes and 2 bottles of dish detergent at CVS today for $0.34 and left with $2.50 in ECB. I started with NONE!  I did use a rain check
  8.  As I was cleaning at work last week, I found a huge stack of papers that have been sitting in the same place for 9 months.  My first thought was to toss them but then I realized wait they have only been printed on one side. So I brought the stack home, cut off the corners with the staples and not have an entire pack of paper to use for printing and the kids art work. I honestly have not bought paper in over two years. We print a lot but keep a scrap paper bin at church and then recycle all we get here. This saves us a bunch on paper. I do have some “clean” paper for use for official things but have found that no one care what the back of my coupons or list say and the kids are so used to coloring on paper that they use at least 10 sheets a day for art!

So it is important to see savings as a marathon not a sprint!

CVS Awesome Trip

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Matt made a pretty interesting statement yesterday.  “CVS is more of a marathon, not a sprint.” I have made two trip to CVS in the past two-day and have done amazingly!  I will preference it by saying that Haley “needed” make up earlier in the week so she asked for some coupons and brought her 5 ECB back for me to you.  So I did begin with 5 ECB and ended today with zero. I spent $15 and saved $68 or 82%.  I am most impressed with the items I purchased: 10  2 L Diet Cokes  (0.99) each, 2 large bags of M&Ms, 2 boxes of movie candy, 2 bottle of Dove Hair Spray, 2 containers of Shampoo, A razor, a container of shaving gel, and 2 bottles of Irish Spring Body wash, These are all items that will be easily used in the next month. I know that I need to stock back up on razors so I am going to watch the sales over the next couple of weeks to see what I can come up!

 

My 2 Cents

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photo (13)This is what I was able to purchase with my 2 cents yesterday at CVS!  I always say that couponing is a game but it is a long game like monopoly. I used 10 ECB to pay for the above items. All the items I purchased were on this current weeks sale,including the toothpaste which was BOGO Free!  But you really can’t look at this purchase in isolation. It really started in January, when I grab a rain check for 24  12 packs of coke products. The rain check was 4 for $10 and 10 ECB when you purchased $30. Last week I went by CVS to pre-order 24 cases of Diet Coke.  Thursday morning, I was able to purchase the 24 packs in two separate transactions. I used 2 free 12 pack coupons to bring the actual cost down to $1.80 per 12 pack including tax.  I chose not to spend my remaining 10 ECB from the second transaction in hopes of a awesome sale that might start on Sunday. I did check Thursday night and discover I really had no interest in going to CVS for the next sale so decide to go ahead and so see what I could use from this weeks sale.

What have you purchased for 2 cent lately?

It’s Official

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I have now completed all the activities need to be considered an “Extreme Couponer.”

One of the students at work asked me if I was one and I said “I don’t think so.” So then she proceed to ask me question to clarify my answer, “Do you have a stockpile?” ” Do you specifically go to a store just to buy something with a coupon?”  After answer yes to these and several other questions, I came up with the one reason I could not be considered an extreme couponer. I have NEVER pre-ordered an item because it was such a great deal and the store would not normally stock this quantity of an item. Today, I crossed over and pre-ordered. In January, CVS had an awesome deal on 12 pack cans, after ECB less than $2 each. I was able to stock up on 20-something of these 12 packs and also got a rain check for an additional 24 packs.  I knew at the time that it would be near impossible to just walk in the store and purchase all 24 of these 12 packs.  So today, I spoke to the cashier and assistant manager, who will order the 24 12 packs of Diet Coke from the Coke man when he comes back to the store.

In addition to pre-ordering the soda, I was able to use the 20% coupon on the front of the circular to stock up on toilet paper, and supply my husband with both coffee and body wash.  After I actually purchase the Diet Cokes I will  up date the numbers but at this point, I have spent $30.07 and saved 23.69 or 56%.

So now you understand how I officially became an Extreme Couponer”