Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Coupon Shopping Triumph: from $200 to $5

I was pretty excited after today's shopping trip at CVS!

I had put quite a bit of prep work into the trip last night. First I went on Hip2Save and brought up the CVS coupons. Than I made my list by copy and pasting the deals and scenarios from Hip2Save into a word document. After that I printed any printable coupons and printed my list and then went downstairs to sit down with the four newspapers I'd bought yesterday morning and my coupon binder (which is badly in need of organizing... which I just never quite have time for...). Two hours of clipping later, it was midnight, and my shopping list had each coupon for the following day carefully checked off and separated into "food" and "other" categories.

This afternoon I undertook the giant shopping trip. I knew that it was going to be huge from my coupons. I had $150 in coupons clipped, not counting sale prices and the extra bucks I'd be getting back.
I don't think that this picture really does my coupon-ing adventure justice. You can't see that there are six lip balms, two lip glosses, six tooth brushes, six flosses, eight air freshners, a ton of baby lotion, diaper rash cream and baby wash, four boxes of cereal, paper towels, six sobes, four 12 packs of soda (which have been put away for a special occasion), tons of snacks for Paul to take when he drives down to school, three tubes of toothpaste and quite a few other deals that were just too good to pass up...

And here's the damage:

My total rang up to a little over two hundred dollars. I used the $150 in coupons. I did have quite a few extra bucks, because I've gotten pretty good at rolling over extra bucks from month to month. That knocked the total down to $65 dollars. After paying the $65 my 12 foot long receipt printed out with $60 of extra bucks (which is like CVS cash) on it for next time, bringing the actual cost of everything to a grand total of $5.

The receipt said I'd saved $260... which I believe is before coupons (from the sale prices themselves), although I'm not 100% sure about that!

Either way I was pretty excited.

Four hours of work saved us at least $200. That's like making $50 an hour. Not bad for a stay-at-home mom. And our cupboards are stocked! By "buying" items when they're basically free we're able to avoid paying very much for anything most of the time.

3 comments:

  1. Nice! Maybe I need to start shopping there lol.

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  2. WOW!!!!! Nicely done!!!! And it is a full-time job - just cleaning out expired coupons is exhausting!!

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  3. Wow, that's totally amazing! I am just getting into couponing (seeing others' inspiring successes such as your own), and hope to stick around a learn a few pointers (just discovered your blog on St. Blog's Parish).

    Your children are adorable, btw.

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