With my husband being laid off of work and me working from home, it has definitely put a huge strain on our finances. We have had to look at ways to cut our spending and our first thought was getting back on track with couponing and finding those amazing ‘hidden’ deals at the grocery stores. With the help of an online email group, readers are kept up to date and well informed of the current and upcoming deals. It is with their help that I am able to slowly grasp the idea of shopping the savvy way! I don’t like to say frugal, I like to say it is smart shopping.
When you start coupon shopping, you want to make sure that you understand your stores coupon policies. My store allows for expired coupons. This makes a good deal even better. We are allowed internet coupons (IPC) at our store as well and there is no limit to how many coupons are allowed as long as you have equal coupons for equal products.
Try to go shopping in an organized fashion. I lack in this department, but I am slowly getting better. I try to only go in with the coupons I need and make sure I have everything written down so I don’t forget what I am doing there and how many products I need to buy to satisfy the deal.
And the last thing I have to mention is you have to be flexible with your brands. You simply take the deals that you are dealt and learn to deal with it! 😛
With that said, today when I went to Jewel, I did two transactions. The first one was for 10 boxes of Swiss Miss hot chocolate. They were on sale for 10/$10 making them each $1.00, but were $2.39 each before the sale. You needed to spend $20.00 and if you do, you will get $10.00 in a catalina or “CAT” back. I scanned all my boxes of Swiss Miss, hit total and it was $24.00 (something like that), then I scanned my preferred card and the discount came off so my total then became $10.00ish. I scanned all my coupons, which brought my total down to $6.00ish. I paid my total and out came my CAT for $10.00 off my next purchase. I just made $4.00 on that deal. Sweetness!
On to my second deal, which really wasn’t a ‘deal’ per say, but what I did was only bought things that I needed or had a coupon for. The photo below shows all I got in the two transactions. I used coupons and CATs (from previous deals which totaled $32.00), so when I calculated everything up, out of my pocket (or OOP) I spent between the two deals less than $24.00 for all that is shown and in addition, I got another CAT for $2.00 off my next shopping order.
