Sunday, January 2, 2011

My Money-Making Day

I love coupons. It's become one of my hobbies, right up there next to reading. I told Jandy yesterday that I was excited about an oatmeal coupon and she called me sad. While she was right, I'm still excited about the coupon. Oatmeal is yummy and it turns out that January is Oatmeal month, so it will go on really awesome sales this month. I need to get more oatmeal coupons.

The other thing I love is when I walk into a store and end up spending pennies or even making money. I did that today. Recently, Excedrin has had a lot of coupons for free bottles of various products and high discount coupons for others. I have been saving them for when CVS would do a "buy Excedrin and get Extra Care Bucks" deal. Extra Care Bucks (ECBs) are basically free money at CVS. You spend X number of dollars and get Y number of dollars in ECBs. And the thing about spending the X number of dollars is that it's always before any coupons, so you can bring the total much lower if you combine it with coupons.

CVS finally had the deal this week. Spend $20 in Excedrin products, get $10 in ECBs. They also had Special K on sale, 3 boxes for $10, plus buy 3 and get $4 in ECBs. I had 2 coupons that were Buy a box of Special K, get a box free. On top of that, I had $2 in ECBs from previous transactions and they give you a quarterly bonus of ECBs based on your spending for the previous quarter, which gave me $4 in ECBs, for a total of $6 in ECBs.

I walked in with a general idea on what it would cost me, with 2 free Excedrin coupons, 2 high amount of Excedrin pm coupons, and 2 Special K coupons. While I was walking through, I found panty hose for myself on clearance, costing $2.50 for 2 (usually $10) and I've been needing some, I picked them up.

So I grabbed my Excedrin and Special K and walked up to check out. I still haven't figured out how it worked out, but between everything, I paid 13 cents. Yeah, 13 cents. Since tax was $1.48, I was actually at -$1.35 after my various coupons, including ECBs. I saved over $40 on my purchase today. Oh, and I got $14 in ECBs for my next trip to CVS.

I should point out that this is very rare for me. I almost never get transactions like that. This is probably the best one I've ever had and the only one close to this was a couple months ago. But man it feels good when I do. Seriously, it makes very happy and keeps me going on coupons. I provided myself with what will probably be a 3 to 6 month supply of pain medication, a couple weeks to a month of cereal and 2 pairs of panty hose that will last at least a year and I paid 13 cents out of pocket.

Any of you big couponers? Do you have any big deals you've made?

1 comments:

Kiersten @ Oh My Veggies said...

I love coupons too! I get migraines, so I nearly had a heart attack when I found that free Excedrin coupon that was floating around a while back. You'd think I'd just won a car or something.

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