michellephilippi.com

I know not every area has stores that double coupons or price match to other stores or honor competitor sales/policies/coupons.  So this week I thought I’d show you a couple of trips to Walmart and Walgreens with no special coupons or doubling or policies that you shouldn’t be able to find in your area.  For me, the foundation of my couponing is subscribing to the Sunday newspaper.  I get 10 delivered on my doorstep every Sunday morning.  Most newspapers have some sort of couponing special that will get you multiple Sunday papers at a discounted rate.  I think the deal that my newspaper offers makes them something like 28-cents each.  It really is a no-brainer as one trip to the store with your coupons will cover your subscription in what you are able to save and score.

Take for example these new Dr. Pepper TENs.  Dr. Pepper with only 10 calories.  We had this, and let me tell you, it’s pretty dang good for a diet soda.  I’ll pay the 10 calories to be able to have a pop that doesn’t taste really diet.  Anyway, new product and they want to hook you so there were FREE coupons in the paper.  Because I get 10 papers, I got 10 FREE 2-liters. There’s the cost of this month’s newspaper – get it? 😉

On this same trip I got more Cover Girl products.  I scrounged up from the neighborhood more $8-off-2 products and got these eye pencils for $3.57 each.  I got $6.02 in overage to go towards the rest of my order: 6 cans of beans, 3 onions, a pack of Hormel bacon, 2 boxes of corn muffin mix, 2 Listerines (got 56-cents of overage on these going to the order as well) and the 14 Cover Girl eye pencils.  All this plus the Dr. Peppers cost me $3.71 total.  $72.80 in product for $3.71 is a 95% savings.

And then there’s Walgreens.  The key to shopping Walgreens and scoring cheap and free stuff is buying things that give you a Register Rewards that you can roll to the next transaction, earn another RR, roll that and repeat a bunch of times.  The Up2U gum was on sale for $1.49, I had coupons that would make them each $1 and then Walgreens had an in-store coupon that gave you $1-off-2 which made these all free.  The Halls were on sale for $1 and then you got a $1 RR back.  So I used previous RRs to pay for these and then got my money back.  I picked up these little Halloween packets of cocoa and also 2 Halloween Butterfinger pumpkins (the kids ate them, I swear!) along with this Reese’s for a total out of pocket of $1.94.  You do have to cover the tax and you do have to have more items than coupons (which is why I added in the cocoa, Butterfinger pumpkins and the Reese’s).  But $1.94 for all this ain’t too shabby.  I don’t have my receipt handy but rough math has this at about a 90% savings.