The Perfect Coupon Storm

I had to share this amazing coupon-ing experience!

I'm a big fan of those little Totino's party pizzas. They're not as good as delivery or pizzeria pizza, but when you're craving some pizza flavor, they do the trick. Plus, they're just about the right size for a grown person to eat!

Unfortunately, the price of these pizzas has gone up quite a bit in the last few years. It used to be pretty common to find them priced at a dollar a piece; nowadays, you're more likely to encounter them at about $1.50 each at Publix or about $1.35 or so at Wal-Mart.

So we were out at Wal-Mart today, getting our food supplies for the week, when I saw the pizzas on sale for the old $1 each pricing! I happily picked up five of them.

Then, Cherry saw something I missed - on one of the pizzas in the refrigerator, there was a sticker - a manufacturer coupon for Buy 3/Get 1 Free! I promptly picked up that pizza, then found another with the same sticker, and got one more for a total of:

6 + 2 free = 8 for $6

At this point, I would have been pretty pleased. However, another promotion caught my eye:

A $5 rebate when you buy four specially marked boxes of pizza! Let me think about this:

• Buy 3, get 1 free for $1 = four pizzas for three dollars
• Use the code on 4 specially marked pizzas, get a 5$ rebate

By combining the three deals (the discount, buy 3 get 1 free, and the $5 rebate), we were earning two dollars for every four pizzas we were going to eat! It's like getting hired to eat!

We promptly snapped up got a cool dozen of these babies!

Saving with Baby, Part Deux

So, a few months back, Grant's Pad showed all you aspiring penny pinchers a few tips on how to save money even after adding a new member to the family. Well, we're back today with some more great info!

Today, we'll focus on coupon clipping. My parents used to clip coupons from the Sunday paper (actually I think they still do from time to time). It seemed like such a time consuming, painful process - all for just a few cents off. But lately, we've come to recognize the power of coupon clipping!

It started way back, early last year, when then-colleague Kenny told me that he and his family had switched to drinking predominantly organic milk. Now, everyone knows that I'm not really that into the tree hugging au natural kind of lifestyle, but having kids sometimes makes you evaluate your foodstuffs with a much more discriminatory eye. However, I wasn't about to spend twice the money on getting all organic groceries!

Having kids makes you think twice about their health and safety, especially when it comes to food!

Kenny informed me that going organic didn't really cost them any more than getting regular groceries did, because there are a lot of coupons available for organic goods. Where, I asked? The answer: where everything else can be found - the Internet, of course!

Specifically, he mentioned the great website SouthernSavers.com. This forum-like site scours the Internet for coupons and great deals at retail stores and on the Internet itself. Coupons for everything from lunch meat to toothbrushes, juice to digital photo prints, chewing gum to toys - almost anything you can think of! There are even coupons that let you outright get stuff for free! We've had 10x13 portraits taken at Sears for a grand total of $0.00, and gotten free deodorant and movie rentals as well. There are so many coupons that you're bound to find one for something you were planning on getting anyway (which is important - you don't want to buy things just because you have a coupon for it! Although there are some exceptions, which I'll go into a bit later...)

So, anyone can find a coupon here and there - but here's the secret to true coupon power: Coupon Combo-ing! You see, generally speaking, there are two types of coupons: store coupons and manufacturer coupons. Most store coupons will state that you can only use one coupon per customer. However, you can often also use one or more manufacturer coupons in conjunction! This is especially powerful if there are also coupons on the product in the store itself (there are usually manufacturer coupons) or if there is a Buy One Get One Free promotion going on. For example, you will often see Oscar Meyer $1 Off coupons for use at Publix (store coupon). Once you get to the store, the $3.50 package of Oscar Meyer ham might also have a $1 Off manufacturer coupon. That reduces the price down to just $1.50 (that's almost 60% off)! Alternatively, if there is a BOGO promotion, the price for two packages of ham starts at $3.50, and you can use two $1 off manufacturer coupons to get both packages for just $1.50 - down from $7 with no deals! And there are almost always coupons for lunch meat on the interwebs so just print out a bunch of 'em and take them to the store when you are running low!

Here's another tip - we're generally taught to buy in bulk to save money on a per-unit basis. Basic economies of scale, right? Well, with coupon clipping, this isn't always the case. Often, you will find coupons for, say, $2 off breakfast cereal, choose between 12 oz., 15 oz., or 18 oz. Family Packs! or something to that extent. You go to the store and see that the cost of the 12 oz. is $2.50, the cost of the 15 oz. is $3, and the cost of the 18 oz. is $3.50. Ordinarily, without a coupon, you would get the Jumbo Family Pack, because the unit price is slightly lower (about 19 cents compared to 21 cents per oz.). But, with the coupon, the unit cost of the 12 oz. pack is just 4.2 cents per oz. compared to 8.3 cents for the 18 oz. using the same coupon! So, when using coupons that allow you to choose the quantity, it's often most cost effective to choose the quantity that had the lowest starting total, not unit, cost.

All this maffs is really con-foozing!

One last word on coupon clipping - this one really blew me away. As mentioned above, there are store coupons and manufacturer coupons. By far, we like manufacturer coupons more because store coupons are subject to price increases by the store itself and you typically can't use them anywhere else (although some stores do actually let you use other store coupons - like Bed Bath and Beyond, which usually seems expensive but is actually is a wonderful store if you use their promotions and customer services, such as price matching, properly). But the most amazing thing about manufacturer coupons is how they work - the manufacturer, e.g. Colgate, actually pays the retailer approximately the value of the coupon when they redeem it. On some occasions, the value of the coupon may actually be greater than the sale price of the product at the store! A few weeks ago, we got dental floss, priced at 88 cents, and were able to apply $1 Off manufacturer coupons, and Wal-Mart gave us the 12 cents difference! Yes, you read that correctly - Wal-Mart paid us to buy the floss! You would be surprised at how often this is actually possible!

So, for all you aspiring savers out there, I hope this helps you save some money. It's just a few bucks here and there, but if you are able to save $5 to $10 on every grocery shopping trip on items you need on a regular basis by having coupons ready, that's easily several hundred dollars over time. Some "super savers" claim that they can consistently save about $500 a month just by coupon clipping! Just be careful you're not buying things you weren't planning on buying to begin with - saving on something you don't want is just wasting money!

Yay for saving money for my college fund!

Saving With Baby

Welcoming a new baby to the world has been a wonderful experience. There are not many things that give me more joy than making my daughter smile (which I can finally consistently do now - Cherry was able to do it a while back by dancing like a monkey in front of her. My technique is a little more "hands-on" and less silly-looking - I help her into a standing position and then tilt her down to my face - and she seems to love it!)


That said, new babies do incur some expense. Of course, there are the expected recurring expenses such as diapers and wipes (we haven't gone into formula yet so that hasn't been a cost). We ended up spending a bit on a new automatic pump, but it has been a life-saver. I think the manual pump was starting to give Cherry carpal-tunnel syndrome or something! For the record, we highly recommend Lansinoh products - we've used their breast pads (something that I never would have dreamed of - basically these pads absorb leaking milk and prevents it from soaking mommy's clothes, which is also a problem that I'd never considered), lanolin cream (addresses sore nipples), manual pump (which is wonderful unless you have to pump more than 3-4 times a day, which is our case), and now their Affinity Double pump. This pump is fairly inexpensive (about half!) compared to many other models, but we like it because it is small, features adjustable speed and power, and is easy to clean - even moreso than the manual pump, which is a HUGE plus because you have to clean pretty much every feeding!

But anyway, enough about that tangent. Most of the costs mentioned above actually haven't amounted to very much, thanks largely in part to modern internet commerce. Via our credit card's online marketplace, which features 5% cash-back when purchasing goods on Walmart.com, the aforementioned breast pump came in more than $10 cheaper than it was at the store, which doesn't seem like much, but these little costs do add up!

But where internet shopping has really helped out is on diapers and wipes. Amazon.com has a wonderful program called Amazon Mom, which essentially is a free trial of Amazon's Prime membership. Basically, Prime offers free 2-day shipping on any Amazon provided product, which means, for us, that we can be running low on diapers but get fast enough turnaround via Amazon to get resupplied at their lower online pricing. That's where Amazon Mom really kicks into gear. By being an Amazon Mom member, you get an additional 15% off of many baby goods, such as diapers.


But, that's not all - any time you spend $25 or more on a baby goods purchase (basically any time you buy diapers in bulk will qualify), you extend your Prime benefits by another month (up to one year). And that's still not all! You can couple Amazon Mom with Amazon's "subscribe and save" service to achieve yet more discount (another 15% for most baby goods). Basically, with this service, you tell Amazon to send you another of the same item at a specified periodic rate (e.g. monthly). It's perfect for things like diapers and wipes. It's also non-binding - you can actually cancel any time, even before your first "reload", and you still get the discounts! To demonstrate the savings, name-brand diapers at Wal-Mart are typically about 22 cents per diaper (some $40 for a pack of about 200, plus taxes). The same diapers are found on Amazon (with no discounts) for about 18 cents per diaper. With the Amazon Mom and Subscribe and Save discounts, this drops to a measly 12 cents per diapers, dropping the pack from over $40 (including taxes), to just over $30. Safely assuming one pack per month or so, that is over $100 in savings per year, on just diapers alone!

Product expenses aside, one major hidden expense I did not anticipate was the increase in utility bills. Power usage has gone up, but not in a huge way. Where we experienced a rather large impact was in our water bill. Prior to Sofia's grand entrance into the world, our typical water usage was around 2000 gallons per month. In her first month, this number went up to around 5000 gallons per month. (Fortunately, the bill does not track usage one-for-one, but it still represented about a 50% increase in the water bill - approximately $30). We attributed this increase partly due to having to flow her bath water constantly to get the right temperature, but the largest part was without a doubt the water we used to clean her bottles and the breast pump after each feeding (6-8 feedings per day). Plus, I had a leaky toilet.

So, over the course of the next month, we went about fixing the problems. I discovered that the toilet was leaking simply because the ball wasn't floating high enough to turn off the flow - this was rectified in true Grantis Mantis fashion by me bending the metal lever such that more leverage was available at the current floating level. Next, I had heard that using a full dishwasher instead of washing dishes by hand every time typically amounted to about 30% reduction in water usage (for the purpose of washing dishes). In the past, we had never really used the dishwasher much, because we figured there is a tradeoff between power and water, because we never really had enough dishes by the end of a day (or two or three) to run the dishwasher, and because we tended to need our pots and pans multiple times over a day or two, so those would have to be washed by hand anyway. However, with the additional people in the house and the added responsibilities, it now made a bit of sense to run the dishwasher every couple of days.

The last action was to figure out what to do about washing the bottles and other stuff. We couldn't simply not wash them. What we ended up doing was collecting the rinse water we used to wash the bottles and pump parts in pails and using the pails to flush the toilet. For those of you who don't know, toilet bowls are designed to flush when water rushes into the bowl - it really doesn't have anything to do with the built in reservoir or anything else about the design of the toilet itself. In a given day, we can collect sometimes close to 20 gallons of water, which we would then use to flush the toilets throughout the day. At about 1.6 gallons per flush, this saved us a substantial amount of water over the course of the month.

All said and done, our last water bill came in at just around 3000 gallons of usage, reducing our bill by about $20, or just under $10 over pre-Sofia usage!

The last task, then, was to counter the anticipated power increase due to using the dishwasher more often. This tip I owe to Kenny, who is also a real economy-minded guy here at work. FPL, the main power company in Florida, has a number of programs and incentives designed to help conserve power. One of these is called "FPL On Call". With this program, FPL installs a controller in your house that will shut off your central cooling/heating, electric water heater, and pool pump (as applicable) in times of extremely high demand. In exchange for "borrowing" your power, FPL credits subscribers to the program up to $136 per year, depending on your appliances and options. The biggest credits are awarded if you allow the controller to shut off your appliances for up to three hour blocks. Now, before you go all crazy, the shutoffs can only occur during absolute peak hours and also only during "core" working hours, i.e. from 9-5 on weekdays, so you won't freeze to death on winter nights or melt over hot summer weekends. Plus, these extreme demand periods happen extremely infrequently - the guy who installed ours said he'd installed his in 1996, and it had only been activated one time for less than one hour, about ten years ago!


So, those are some of the little tips and tricks we've learned to help you stay afloat, even with a new addition to the family! Each tip on it's own just amounts to about $10-20 in savings per month, but together over the course of the year, it's still a few extra hundred in your wallet!