Saturday, January 31, 2009

Savings Information

Several people have inquired about the ECBs and other coupon terms, so I wanted to use today to try to answer some of those questions. Instead of trying to type out information that is on so many other websites, I'm just going to provide links to those sites so you can read the information as you have time.

ECB Information
CVS Shopping for Newbies
Walgreens Shopping

To find all of the deals for the week for most stores, including drug stores and grocery stores, check out this pretty comprehensive list. If you don't want to spend the time tracking down all the information on blogs, you might want to consider going the Grocery Game or using Coupon Mom to find everything already put together for you. A few other tips along with stores can also be found here.

For me, I buy 2-3 newspapers a week so that I have more than one set of coupons to work with. You will still save in the beginning, but the real savings come once you get a good stockpile. Once you have most of the items you use already on hand, you can wait for them to go on sale again to maximize your savings. I try to buy meat when it is on sale too and stock my freezer up as much as I can. If you don't have a stand alone freezer, I would really recommend getting one. It will save you so much money in the long run. If not, you'll be running out and buying meat at the non-sales price to make that recipe you just have to have that week. Same goes for frozen veggies and other snacks. My freezer is full right now thanks to the current Mega Deals at Kroger! I also bought an extra turkey at Thanksgiving while they were cheap and got a ham after Christmas at a great discount! If I didn't have my freezer, I couldn't have done that.

Another great way to save that I have discovered lately is Kroger closeouts. I bought some razors just today that were normally 4.99, but were on closeout for 2.09. I had $2 coupons for them, so they were only .09 each. I also got some good deals on cleaning products the same way. I went early this morning and made my way down each aisle looking for markdowns and closeouts that I had coupon matches for. It took a little time, but I enjoy saving so it was fun for me.

A great way to keep up with deals and sales is to sign up for Google Reader and subscribe to several money saving blogs. You can then go read any new posts on a daily basis and find any special sales as well as the weekly store sales. I follow around 8 or 10 of them myself and put together all the information to do my deals each week.

As far as other terms and abbreviations I use on the blog, there is a list over on the sidebar that you can use as a reference.

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