Price Matching Shopping

I usually don't do too much price matching shopping at Walmart, but this week I found a few "stock up" priced items in the Albertsons, Smiths, and Vons ads and didn't really want to go to each store just for a couple of items, so I got all my ads and my coupons together and headed over to the Walmart Neighborhood Market (I like this place SO much more than the regular super Walmart). I was really excited with the deals that I got. The normal Walmart price for all these items would have been $27.10, but with coupons I saved $12.50 and with price matching an additional $5.10, bringing my grand total down to $9.50--a 65% savings on the already low Walmart prices! You can get these deals too--the Albertsons, Vons, and Smiths ads all run through Tuesday May 26th. Go to Grocery Smarts (this is the Nevada link only) to look up the good deals and find where the coupons are at (some were in the Sunday papers and some were printable). Have a happy Memorial Day!

Free Ice Cream Day

If you normally shop at Walmart, plan on making a shopping trip there on Saturday, May 30th. From 11am to 4pm they will be giving away free ice cream treats to their customers (one per person). For details or to see if your Walmart will be participating, go here.

Free Dinner at Del Taco

Join Del Taco's Raving Fan E-club and they will email you a coupon for 2 free chicken soft tacos, no purchase necessary. Go here to sign up to get your free meal. My husband and I both signed up and went for dinner on Saturday. It was great not having to cook after getting off of work that afternoon!

Free Chocolate Reminder

Don't forget to sign up for your free chocolate bar tomorrow morning (Friday). Confused?--see my post about it here

Target Deals--Week of May 10-16

I went this morning to do my Target deal shopping for the week. I got the deal info here, but went yesterday evening just to see what they actually had (sometimes the deals posted on Money Saving Mom are regional and don't apply to us). I then came home and printed off the online coupons that I needed and went back this morning to do my shopping. I got all of these items for $10.48. Using coupons alone, I saved over $28 bringing my savings to 73%. All the items seen here were bought using printable coupons, so if you don't get the newspaper, don't worry, you can still get these same great deals.

Here is the breakdown (the price is after coupons are applied--see the link to get the coupon info):

Coppertone Suncare Product (trial size): free x 2 = $0.00

Nabisco 100 Calorie Snack boxes: $0.04 x 3 = $0.12

Ritz Crackers: $0.54 x 3 = $1.62

Kraft Mayo: $0.50 x 2 = $1.00

Kraft Velveeta Shells and Cheese: $0.64 x 3 =$1.92

Target Baby body wash: $0.44 x 3 =$1.32

Quaker True Delights Bars: $0.89 x 3 = $2.67

Kraft Easy Mac cups: $0.42 x 4 = $1.68

Tax: $0.15

Total: $10.48 on 23 items

The Target printable coupons do say 1 per transaction on a given item, so I split my shopping up into 3 transactions and would do 1 item per transaction (ex. do 1 body wash per transaction instead of lumping them all into the same one). Have fun shopping!

$10 coupon for Kohl's

Did anyone else see the $10 off a purchase of $20 or more coupon in yesterdays Review Journal Newspaper? It was stuck on the front page. This is a great coupon, especially if you have a Kohls charge card (yes, I succumbed to getting one a couple of years ago when I shopped a bunch there before I got married), because from May 14-20 you can also get anywhere from 15-30% off your purchase on top of the sales they may be already running using your Kohls card. Combine that with the $10 coupon and you could get yourself something nice. Happy (belated) Mother's Day.

Amazing Diaper Deal at Walgreens

I have found a mega cheap way to stock up on diapers this week, and believe me we have totally stocked up for the next several months. Walgreens diapers are on sale Buy one get one free. They are usually $9 for a jumbo pack, but if you buy more than 1, they drop down to 2 for $16 or $8 a piece. Since they are buy one get one free this week, that equates to $4.50 per pack for the first 2 and $4 for how ever many after that that are bought in the same transaction.


Now here is the amazing part of the deal. If you go back to the pharmacy counter and ask them for one of their "$50 in savings" coupon booklet, there is a Walgreens coupon in there for $2 off Walgreens brand diapers. When the cashier puts this coupon code in, it will take off $2 on every single pack of diapers in your transaction, thus making the first 2 packs $2.50 each and the rest $2 each. That is a great deal for a jumbo pack of diapers.


If that wasn't good enough, here is something else you can do to get more bang for your buck. Walgreens has their Iceland Health Omega-3 Fish Oil soft gels (120 count) on sale for $8 a bottle, but you will get an $8RR after purchasing it. Also, their Bayer quick release crystals (4 count box) are on sale for $2.50 with a $2.50RR printed off too (this is a month long RR deal). If you are willing to do a lot of transactions (1 transaction per 1 Bayer or 1 Fish Oil), you can get enough RR to pay for your diaper transaction. For example, if you were planning on getting 8 packs of diapers using the above deal, the total would come to about $17 (plus tax). You could buy 6 Bayer quick release boxes (each in a separate transaction), and get $15 in RR to use towards your diapers, or you could buy 2 Fish Oil bottles (again, separate transactions) and get $16 in RR to use towards the diapers. It's like getting more for free!


As you can see from my picture, I went a little wild with this deal and kept going back to Walgreens to get more diapers (I've been 3 times and cleaned out almost 3 stores). I bought 3 size 1, 3 size 2, 8 size 3, 10 size 4, and 6 size 5, plus 1 bottle of Omega-3 Fish Oil (they are really great to take if you have dry eyes), 17 boxes Bayer quick release tablets, and 1 box Glucerna cereal (I had a coupon for a free box, so I picked it up while I was there). As my luck would have it, my Walgreens March Rebate gift card came in the mail this week and I was able to use that on a lot of it, so I pretty much have only spent about $15 out of pocket for all of this.

As for how good Walgreens diapers are--I can't really complain too much about them. My daughter has blowouts in any kind of diaper, including Pampers and Huggies, so I am very content getting whatever brand I can for cheap. When your husband is in medical school, and you are trying your very hardest not to take loans out for living expenses, you can't be too picky. I feel very blessed from above for help in finding amazing deals on the things that we need and the ability to stock up so that we will not only have food storage for a few months, but we will have enough of diapers and other toiletries to last several months too. I know it might seem silly to have gotten some size 1 and 2's since my daughter is in 3s, but I figure we might as well have a few on hand for when we have our next baby (no, this is not an announcement) or in case a friend needs some. Happy shopping this week. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment and I'll answer it as soon as I can.

Free Chocolate!

Free chocolate--what could be better?! Starting today, Friday May 8th, through September, Mars will be giving away coupons for a free candy bar here to the first 250,000 people each Friday who sign up starting at 9am ET. If you miss out this week, they will do the same thing next Friday, and the next, etc. Limit is 1 coupon per email address per Friday, with a limit of 4 per household throughout the entire promotion period. You should receive your coupon in the mail in 4-6 weeks. Thank you Mommy's Wish List for the info. By the time my coupon gets here, I will officially be done with my "no chocolate for 6 months" goal (ends June 1st), and I am already trying to decide which candy bar to get with my coupon. I'm leaning towards 3 Musketeers (it's always been my favorite). Which candy bar will you get?

Staples Rebate Offers

You can pick up a couple of things at Staples this week that are either free or close to it after rebate. They are

1. Casio KL-60L Labelmaker -- cost $19.99 with a $20 Easy Rebate = Free

2. HP Multipurpose Paper 500 count -- cost $7.29 with a $6.29 Easy Rebate = $1 (limit 2 per household)

3. Peachtree Pro Accounting 2009 -- cost $140 with a $140 mail in rebate = Free

We did the labelmaker and paper deal this week. Staples "easy rebate" really is just that--Easy. You do it all on line--no mailing, no forms, no stamps. I love these kind of rebates. The accounting software looked interesting, but it is geared more towards a small business versus a home budgeting software, so we passed this one up, but you may still find some use for it. Since it is a mail in rebate, it will take longer to get your $140 back, so it may or may not be worth it.

Target Deals--May 3-9

Target is having a pretty good deal right now, especially if you already have a few things that you need to get from there anyway. If you buy 4 Fiber One products (cereal, granola bars, toaster pastries, muffin mix, pancake mix), you get a $5 gift card towards your next purchase. If you have saved any fiber one coupons up, this could actually mean they essentially pay you to take the items. Let me show you what I mean:

Trip one (this was a better savings than trip 2, but I didn't have as good of coupons for my second trip):

bought 2 cereals at 2.39/box (sale price) and 2 toaster pastries at 1.79/box (sale price), and used 4 $1 off coupons = $4.36 spent ... but I got a $5 gift card so I really made 0.64 for gettting 2 boxes of cereal and 2 boxes of toaster pastries.

This was worth it for me because I needed to get my little girl some Huggies swim diapers at Target before my $3 off 1 pkg. coupon expired. Using my coupon, gift card, and getting 2 V8 splashes (and using coupons on them) and a box of envelopes which we just plain needed, I spent overall $10.94 for everything, including the Fiber One stuff. Considering that the swim diapers would have cost me $11.64 (that includes the tax) I actually spent less on all of this stuff than just buying the swim diapers!

Trip 2:

I did the fiber one deal again and got 3 cereals and 1 muffin mix (each on sale for $2.39), but only had 2 $0.75 coupons and 1 $1 coupon, so I spent $7.06 on the 4 items, getting a $5 gift card (so really only spending $2.06).

I did this because we really needed some brita filter replacements for our water pitcher. There is a $5 off manufacturers coupon in the Albertsons ad this week for the Brita pitchers or filters, but Target's price is cheaper than Albertsons for this. It was priced at $16.69 (includes tax), but I used my $5 coupon and $5 gift card earned, bringing the total down to $6.69.

Combining the 2 transactions I only spent $13.75 -- $3 less than it would have cost me to purchase the brita filters by themselves. Awesome.

While the really good fiber coupons are no longer available, you can still print off some descent ones here or here. The Brita coupon is a manufacturer's coupon, not an Albertson's coupon, so you can clip it out of the ad and use it anywhere (it expires on 05/15/09). Happy shopping!

Free 8x10 photo

On Wednesday May 6th only, get a free 8x10 photo at Walgreens. Just go online and make an account with them. Place an order online using the coupon code MOTHER at checkout to claim a free picture. I think that you can choose a store to pick it up at when you do the online order. Just a little pre-Mother's Day treat. Enjoy.

Free KFC Dinner

This promotion is even better than their free piece of grilled chicken that they had the other week. For a limited time you can get a free meal from KFC including 2 pieces of grilled chicken, 2 sides, and a biscuit. All you need to do is go here to print of a coupon. You should be able to print it 4 times it a great dinner for a family of four. I would hurry and get the coupons printed out before there are no more left online or the offer closes Wednesday May 6 at midnight. The coupon is good from 5/5/09 to 5/19/09. How nice--two days that I don't have to make dinner for my husband and myself! Thank you Money Saving Mom for the info.

Bring on the May deals

It's only the 4th of May and I've hit the ground running on the shopping deals for this month. Thanks to my sweet husband, I was able to hit the Vons sale by myself--it made shopping so much easier without a baby carrier taking up the entire cart. They are running an awesome deal that, unfortunately, ends tomorrow night--buy $30 of participating products, get an instant $10 coupon good on your next purchase. There are so many products in the store that are on this deal. Just look for the sticker on the shelves. I was able to use a bunch of coupons that I had and get $30 worth of these products, plus a few other items that we needed, all for $26.14 (a 66% savings over the total value of $72.14), plus I have a $10 voucher good towards my next purchase!

Another week brings another bunch of deals at Walgreens. I picked up a few things today to add to our storage. This week was a lot easier than last weeks (only 5 transactions instead of the 12 that I had to do last week). I got$43.63 worth of items for $9.76, a 78% savings. Pretty good considering the swiffer starter kit retails for over $12 itself. 14 items for $9.76--less than a dollar per item. That's worth the trip.