Some of you have wondered where I get my printable coupons. Here are the main coupon sites that I use: Coupons.com, Ibotta and Fetch Rewards. Manufacturer websites and Facebook pages are also great sources.
If you are new here and unfamiliar with my weekly What I Spent & Saved posts, it probably is helpful to understand a bit about how I shop. I do something called stockpile shopping. This simply means that when I see an item at rock bottom prices that I regularly use or know that I can use, I’ll buy several of it. This might seem kind of crazy, but it honestly saves me hundreds of dollars a year! Simply put, by buying 6 bags of frozen veggies when I can get them for $0.50/bag with a coupon and sale instead of paying the full price of $1.50, I save $6.00. This savings adds up pretty quickly! Want to know more about this kind of shopping? Up until recently, I blogged at Parents.com and one of my readers wrote a great post for me there about 5 Tips to Spend Less but Get More.
I also buy meats and veggies in bulk. The meat I either can or freeze and then obviously have it on hand whenever I need it. I buy large quantities of fruits and veggies when they are in season and I can get them at really great prices. By canning or freezing them, I save a lot and we are able to enjoy great produce for less cost all year long. I do still buy some fresh fruits and veggies too. In fact, every 7 to 10 days I go to our local farmer’s market and get several heads of lettuce so that we can enjoy salads at least 4 times a week.
I hope that helps you make sense of some of this. I realize at first glance it can really look like we eat rather strangely! Of course, if you have any questions feel free to ask them in the comments! I’ll be more than happy to try to answer them.
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Favorite buys:
- Huggies diapers for $3.99 each
- Walgreens baby wipes for free!
- Walgreens diapers for $2.90 each
- Free banana
- Free Aveeno lotion
- Free Reese’s peanut butter chips
- Better than free sausage
Please excuse the poor quality and missing images. I somehow deleted a bunch of my pictures and the few I was able to retrieve were of poor quality. 🙁
Total Spent: $11.99 + gift cards
Total Saved with Coupons: $22.00
Total Saved with Sales: $35.63
Total Saved: $57.63
CVS: $0 (gift card)
Saved with Coupons: $17.00
Saved with Sales: $12.00
I had a CVS gift card that I earned through Recyclebank that I used to pay for this purchase of $6.97.
It was a great week to buy diapers at CVS! I got these for just $3.99/pack after coupons and sales. I’m excited to finally have our just turned 3 year old fully potty trained and know that we’ll see some big savings since we won’t be going through as many diapers. She’s been partially trained for a long time and should have been fully trained months ago. I’ve just had too many irons in the fire and didn’t feel like I had energy to work on it. But my husband took matters into his own hands one evening recently when he was home with the kiddos by himself. He simply put undies on her and motivated her by giving her an M&M each time she went potty in the toilet. It worked like a charm and because she was already mostly potty trained anyway, was a pretty painless transition! Yup, he’s a keeper….and not just because he helps potty train our kids. 🙂
Bought:
- 3 Huggies diapers $7.99 each
– used three $2.00 Huggies printable coupons
– used $1.00 Huggies CVS printable coupon
Other Coupons Used:
- $10.00 in ExtraBucks (CVS coupons that print at register for purchasing specific items)
Got Back:
- $5.00 in ExtraBucks for purchasing the Huggies (can be used on next purchase of any item)
Walgreens: $7.77
Saved with Coupons: $3.00
Saved with Sales: $14.81
Walgreens was also a hot place to buy diapers this week! I had actually hoped to buy more, but they were out of stock so I had to get a rain check instead.
The wipes were all totally free, after sales, and the diapers were only $2.90/pack after coupons and sales! I’ve used the Walgreens brand diapers in the past and have been very happy with them. I feel like they work as well as Pampers or Huggies and when I can get them this cheap, it’s a no-brainer!
Interested in more ways to save on diapers? Here are 7 things that I do to save on diapers and wipes!
Bought:
- 4 Walgreens brand wipes $1.00 each (on sale buy one, get one free)
- 2 Walgreens brand diapers $8.79 total (on sale buy one, get one free)
– used two $1.50 Walgreens diaper printable coupons
Other “Coupons” Used:
- $2.00 worth of Walgreen’s Balance Rewards points
Got Back:
- $2.00 in Walgreens Balance Rewards for purchasing the Walgreens wipes (can be used on next purchase of any item)
– I actually bought the wipes in one transaction and then used the reward points on the diapers in my second transaction
Giant: $4.22 + gift cards
Saved with Coupons: $2.00
Saved with Sales: $8.82
I realized after I got home, that I actually did better on my deals at Giant this week than I thought. I had figured that I’d be paying $0.50 for the Reese’s chips and $0.25 each for the Aveeno. Instead, both things ended up being free due to some additional unadvertised sales that Giant was apparently running.
The Morton salt was also free. I buy sea salt to use on food, but since this was free I got it and will use it to make homemade play dough. The banana was free and the Banquet sausages were part of this weeks gas rewards deals and ended up being a moneymaker of $1.25, which the whole reason I bought them.
(If you aren’t familiar with how the gas deals work, basically you earn so much off a gallon of gas when you purchase a certain number of specific items. This time I earned $10.00 worth of free gas for purchasing the Banquet sausages.)
Oh and the candy. How could I forget the candy? If you follow me on Facebook you may have seen my post about making a snowman birthday cake for our daughter’s third birthday. Well, I was initially thinking that I’d have to buy several bags of candy to get the couple of pieces that I needed to make the buttons, scarf, eyes and mouth on the snowman. But then on my way to Giant I remembered that they have bulk bins of candy there. Normally, I would consider those bins to be a more expensive way to purchase candy. But since I was only wanting a couple of pieces, it ended up being perfect! My 6 yr. old was with me and we had fun figuring out what pieces would work the best for what we needed. He was quite full of ideas and of course thought we should buy much more than we actually did!
Bought:
- Morton salt $0.79
– used FREE product Saving Star offer (got $0.79) - Bulk candy $0.69
- Hershey’s Reese peanut butter chips $2.00
– used $1.00 Giant store ecard offer
– used Hershey’s chips $0.50 printable coupon (doubled to $1.00) - 2 Aveeno lotion $0.99 each
– got back $2.00 via Checkout 51 - 7 Banquet sausage $1.25 each
- Banana $0.25
– got back $0.25 via Checkout 51
Got Back:
- $10.00 in gas rewards savings for purchasing the Banquet sausage
Misc.: $0
- Used grocery cash to pay for milk that we bought from a local dairy
Tanya
Visiting from Thrifty Thursdays. very impressive you can get by on $200/month for groceries. I was a couponer but sort of fell off the wagon the last few months. Great tips!
ThriftyFrugalMom
Thanks Tanya! Yes, couponing does take time and effort that is for sure! I always struggle staying with it during busy seasons like Christmas too. It’s easy to get overwhelmed and burnt out doing it, so sometimes I’ll take a short break just to refresh. Usually, I’m ready to jump back into it again then!
ThriftyFrugalMom
Thanks for dropping by, Tanya! There’s no doubt about it, couponing definitely takes time and energy. I love it…at least most of the time. But I still take occasional breaks just to keep from burning out. Maybe since Christmas is over you can jump back into couponing. Or, maybe it’s just not going to work for you in this stage of life. That’s okay too. 🙂