After a three month hiatus for house hunting/moving I went back to coupon shopping this week. It was really nice to have a break and I think it might be a nice tradition to stop couponing around the holidays.
Of course the holidays weren't totally void of money-saving deals, but it was more along the lines of reaping the benefits of my work through the year. I had bought a few toys on sale last spring (handy when both boy's birthdays and Christmas fall with in a short time frame) and had been saving up my swagbucks amazon gift cards so that I had $50 to spend online for gifts. It was really nice having that money when we pretty much spent all our actual money buying a house.
I've decided to keep things simple this time around and am not using any newspapers, only the coupons I can print online. A subscription to the newspaper with the good coupons costs $3.25/weekend, so I'm going to keep an eye on what deals I can't get to see if it will be worth buying a paper again.
What prompted me out of my coupon apathy was a great deal on cereal. We go through a lot of cereal now and I can't imagine how much more we're going to eat as the boys grow. I got six boxes of Honey Bunches of Oats (family size box) for $1 each and two boxes of Mom's Natural cereal for 49c each. I also got 12 Balance protein bars (I'm not fooled, I know they're just a wanna-be-healthy chocolate granola bar) for 16c each and two bags of goldfish crackers for $1 each. The protein bars and fishies are for our upcoming trip to Disneyland in March. Oh, I haven't mentioned that yet? Yeah, Yorgesen family reunion in DL. I'm super excited about it, but at the same time really anxious to take a three year old autistic boy and a one year old to one of the most sensory overloading places on earth. One of my big distraction plans is to have food, lots and lots of food. Hence the reason why I'm keeping an eye out for snack foods now.
Now that we're paying significantly more for a place to live (those utility bills are about to give me a stroke) it's even more important for my family to save money where it can. I've cut about a third of our food budget since I started tracking our expenses and using my money smarter a year and a half ago. David is on board too, using coupons when I send him shopping and using a program similar to swagbucks on Bing that essentially pays for his Xbox stuff and also helps get amazon gift cards for things like a new charger for our itouch. Bring it on, yucky economy. We're ready.
3 comments:
Oh snap, I love Honey Bunches of Oats. What a deal! We've been doing the occasional online coupon printing lately, and even just a dollar or two saved brings Jared and I such joy at the checkout. :) Just think how we'd feel if we saved as much as you guys do!
What is the Bing program you use? Maybe I can Alex hooked on something like that. I started a second job in July and I haven't been able to coupon much since then. I hardly have any time to do anything for myself and I would love to start couponing again so save even just a few extra dollars a month.
He has Bing set as his default search engine and can get a max of 10pts per day for searches. Unlike swag bucks, you can just do a bunch of random searches and get it in about 2-3 minutes. There are other daily things that come up for points, like surveys which you can check at the top of the downloaded bing search bar. He's done enough to pay for his gold membership and pay for new maps on his games. And I use erewards to take surveys and get $25 a quarter in GameStop gift cards.
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