My first Money Making Trip!

Today was a busy day of shopping. My friend Jamie came over about 9:30 this morning, we got a few things together and started our last round of shopping trips out of this week. No matter how prepared we are – the trip seems to take us all day.

Part of our shopping delay is our super cute helper! We’ve dubbed her Coupon Baby! She had a death grip on the coupons her mom brought with us. She’s very good for almost 2 months, and doesn’t seem to mind us dragging her around to several stores.

Another reason it takes us so long – we hit multiple stores. This might seem crazy for someone to spend a whole day hopping from Walgreens to Walgreens – but the different locations around on here have different stock days, and different areas don’t as many couponers.

My long time friend Jamie is now a SAHM and I’m.. a SAHG? I don’t know if there is a correct term for it! I work from home when I can and stretch those dollars as much as possible. So we’ve decided to take one day a week to dedicate to our shopping. By a quick glance tonight on google, within a 10 mile radius of my house we have 7 CVS locations, 6 Rite Aids, 6 Walgreens, 6 Krogers, 1 Meijer, 2 Kmarts, 1 Walmart and 2 Targets.. honestly I knew where half of the CVS and less than that of the Rite Aids… but todays trip including visits to 4 of the Walgreens and we still didn’t find everything. But as tiring as these marathon shopping days are, they are well worth the trip. I think that this is one of the benefits of living in a big city metro area. We can hop from location to location and we can take advantage of different deals, and we can easily split the transactions when we need to between different locations.

I have a couple more quick trips tomorrow I think, especially since I have found a couple new locations for stores! I don’t think my shopping is ever done.

This is the haul from today, it really looks a lot bigger than it is, and that is mostly to blame on the Ziploc food container. I only spent a total of $35.06 on everything and received $8.00 Walgreen Register Rewards (Total OOP $27.06), and the total MSRP is $97.32, so the total savings was 73%! Not as good as some of my other shopping trips, but I purchased a few items I wanted which weren’t on a super deal. But overall it was a pretty great trip.

The cherry on top of the day was what I got when I found home, two coupon packets, a free sample and a couple bags of gluten free treats I won in a giveaway for National Celiac’s Month.

After Jamie and her little one went home, and I made sure our household was fed I made one more trip out to Walgreens. Yes, the fifth one of the day, and the closest to my house. I was searching for the Colgate toothpaste deal, but wasn’t able to find any. I finally found one of the workers and he went off to look for them them “upstairs” as well as the reach toothbrushes. Both on sales… great sales, but I didn’t have any coupons with me!
The Soft Soap is currently on sale for 2/$6 and then you get $4 RR.

And here is the deal on the Reach Toothbrushes, Walgreens is having a deal until next Saturday (May 28th) – here is the coupon deal if you have them:

Buy 2 Toothbrushes – Get $1 RR
Buy 3 Toothbrushes – Get $2 RR
Buy 4 Toothbrushes – Get $4 RR

Use 4 $1/1 Reach Toothbrushes (4/17 SS) -OR-
Use 2 $2/2 Reach Toothbrushes (5/8 SS)

So if you use your coupons, and buy 4 toothbrushes, you will walk out with a $4 overage.

This isn’t exactly what I did today- I did not have any coupons with me- I’m actually going to look to see if I have the 5/8 coups in a few when I hit the next Walgreens tomorrow.

Tonight’s trip broke down a little differently – I had two bottles of soft soap and 4 toothbrushes – total $10.56 starting out. I paid $6 with RR from Walgreen’s trips earlier today and paid $4.56 out of pocket. The cashier was a little snippy due to it getting towards the end of her shift. But her attitude changed when my first $4 RR from the Soft Soap printed out she said “Wow you just paid 56 cents for all this!” and she turned to hand me my receipt and RR, but she stopped when the machine started to spit out another $4 RR. “WAIT? You just got paid to take stuff?” This got the attention of the security guard who stopped me so I could explain to him how I did it.

Yes.. that’s right- I got stopped by Security to explain how to coupon. This was amazing to me!

You might be asking why I needed 4 more toothbrushes, didn’t I just get 6 last week? Yes I did, and I plan on going to get 4 more tomorrow at Walgreens if they actually have it. Why you might ask? To donate – just like the extra body washes I’ve been getting for pennies. No I’m not going to make boyfriend swim in mens body wash- there are a lot of people in the area who can use it, and if I can help out I would like to.

A funny side note on the toothbrushes (or ironic at least). A few weeks back we had a plumbing explosion. As I was trying to clean it up, I somehow knocked BOTH of our toothbrushes onto the dirty floor. In an older home without a dishwasher there was no way to save them. My funds were super low that day but I went out and used the rest of what I had for toothbrushes, I think they may have been on sale, but I may have spend $10 on them – my last $10 for the week or maybe two. The last couple weeks I have purchased 10 toothbrushes for under $4 TOTAL..

This is the difference between couponing and not couponing to me.. even if I donate half of the ones I buy, we wont run out or I wont have to spend my last dollars to make sure we can do basic day to day things.

Let me know what other deals you found out there! very day! Thank you for your support!