Inspired by Sandy from Yes I am Cheap sharing her Non Extreme Couponing Experience, I thought I would share with you my somewhat mild extreme couponing experience.  As you know, I have been a bit of a coupon fiend lately, watching the show Extreme Couponing gets me riled up and excited (though I definitely don’t agree with buying 90 tubes of toothpaste, or 123 deodorants “just ’cause”).  I am more of the variety of buying items that I need with coupons to save money, and not buying 15 of them.  Two to five of the same items, maybe.  But not fifteen.

As you also know, I have been reading Mrs January’s blog (looove it!) because she matches up the coupons in the mail to the sales in store.  I have been saving up my free product coupons (like the Glade coupon) for those days where you need to purchase $50 worth of goods to get 20x the points at Shoppers Drug Mart (one of my favourite stores not only because I’m a shareholder, but I find that Shoppers shows growth, flexibility, and not to mention, it has a great rewards program).

So, last Saturday, there was a 20x the points event.  Usually each dollar you spend is only worth 10 points.  But on these special days, if you spend $50, you can get 20x the points.  50,000 points gives you a $80 redemption, so you can see that if you spend $50 on these days five times, you can get $80!  If you couple that with the more bang for your points days (that’s what I call them anyway), you will get to $100 for 50,000 points.

So here’s a recap of the mission:

GOAL: To accumulate $50 worth of groceries/ necessary items and obtain 20x the points (about 10,000 points) using the least of amount of money possible.

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Here’s a guest post by fellow PF blogger NerdWallet, a fellow late 20-something personal finance junkie.  This post is about Black Friday- the only Black Friday I ever went to was in NYC.  Let me tell you…it was CRAZY BUSY.  I lined up for 2 hours to try on a pair of jeans and ended up getting them because I was so mad I it took me 2 hours to try them on.  Glad we have online shopping now.  Here’s what NerdWallet has to say about himself:

Tim Chen is a cheap nerd. NerdWallet was a byproduct of his overzealous attempt to

find the best credit card, which resulted in a database of nearly 600 credit cards and

some extremely over-the-top APR and Rewards sorting algorithms.

Coupons only get you halfway there – Save extra with “bonus malls”

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are around the corner. While most of you are

probably savvy enough to search for web coupons before pulling the trigger, you

may not realize that you could be leaving an additional 5% to 20% on the table.

Meet the “Bonus Mall”.

Bonus Mall websites are shopping portals. They generally have a huge list of

retailers, and give you some kind of kickback per dollar spent, when you click

through from the mall to the retailer.

There are over two dozen of these malls. This is because they are attached to many

frequent flyer programs, hotel point programs, and credit card programs. Bonus

malls also exist in the form of third party deal sites like FatWallet and eBates.

To give you a concrete example, I recently bought some office supplies from Office

Depot. First, I grabbed a coupon (“82632163” gets you 14% off) from a coupon

website. Second, I ran a search on NerdWallet’s discount finder tool that compares

Office Depot kickbacks at every bonus mall – there are 19 hits, which range from 1%

to 7%.

I happen to be a holder of a Chase Sapphire Preferred card, so I went with the Chase

Ultimate Rewards Mall, which gives 7 bonus points per $1 spent, or effectively 7%

off. This combined with the 14% coupon saved me over 20%!

Which malls do I qualify for?

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A generalization of Generation Y (read: 20-somethings) is that we want things done fast, done now, right away, no time to wait….er…did I lose your attention already?

Generation Y are internet and techonology savvy (everyone at work is AMAZED at my typing speed. AMAZED. I honestly do not think I type that fast) so we don’t really have the time or energy to sit through flyers and circle what we want on sale. To find information that we need, we google. To spread information to friends, we facebook or twitter. So, to find the coupons and grocery store deals we need, what should we do?

I like to save money on groceries, and I like to use coupons (I’m not ashamed to use coupons, are you?) at the checkout.
There’s a Canadian website (based in Victoria, our good ol’ capital city of Beautiful British Columbia) called: Grocery Alerts Canada – Coupons and Deals that gives you the one-stop shop for flyers in Victoria, Vancouver, and the T-Dot (that’s Toronto, in Canadian-speak). It eliminates the need to scour the flyers for the grocery item that you need- or don’t need, and it has posts on hot coupons (I’m printing out that 75 cent coupon for Olympic Yogurt- that stuff is pricey, but delicious!) and deals. You can even subscribe to deals in your area and get it emailed to you, handy for you to print out.

Check out the latest coupons out to the right of this post ——->

Do you cut or print out coupons to save money?
(every little bit counts right?)

I used to be so ashamed when I was shopping with my mom at the grocery store and she whipped out her coupons. I’m not sure why I was (must’ve been my teenage angst)- maybe it’s true what they say that you turn into your parents when you get older….

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