A couple good shopping trips, lots of savings without many coupons and tips on saving on holiday shopping.

The only thing I love more then shopping is saving! I haven't posted a good shopping trip in a while but that doesn't mean I haven't had one :) I seriously shop almost every day, I don't work so once I drop my son off at school I have 6 1/2 hours of time to waste. I'll spare you photos and detailed lists on most of them but here are a few awesome trips I had lately...

Halloween candy for FREE!!!

My niece Emmy and Nephew DJ with our haul of free candy.

Mars had a printable coupon for $1.50 off any of their fun size bags, you are only allowed to print 2 per computer, I have 3, my boyfriend has 3 and my sister has 3, not enough for me so my sister took the printer to school with her and all of her classmates printed their 2, we ended up with 112 coupons. We got 22 bags for the trick or treaters and saved 90 of them because I know walmart puts their candy 50% off the day after Halloween! After the discount each bag was either $1.25 or $1.50, we ended up getting 32 bags of the MM to make $8.00 and the rest was FREE!!! We used the $8.00 overage to help pay for the rest of the goodies we got. TIP #1 in saving on holiday shopping, buy non-perishable holiday stuff on clearance for the next year and box it up for storage. We always get the pumpkin carving kits, candles, goodies for treat bags for the kids class (like the spider rings, pencils and rubber bracelets) and any decorations we like, like strands of lights, tombstones and skulls. If you do this for every holiday then eventually you will have the best decorated house on the block and not had to break the bank to do it! A little out of order based on the title of this post but while we're on the subject here's TIP #2 in saving on holiday shopping, use your coupons on the holiday clearance. In Caren's last post she had got Halloween Softsoap- reg $3.99, sale 50% off, with coupon: $.74 and Halloween Kid's Colgate toothpaste- reg $3.99, sale 50% off, with coupon $.99. I didn't find those deals but I did get some Halloween Renuzit air fresheners- reg $1.00, sale 20 cents, coupon for 55 cents off 3, total price for each 3 was 5 cents! We now have 39 air fresheners that cost me a total of 65 cents! TIP #3 in saving on holiday shopping, online shopping- I order a lot from Walmart.com and other online sites but before I place my order I will do a google search for online coupon codes, you can almost always find one for free shipping or a certain % off your total order. Another way I save on online purchases is to go to ebates.com. You just go to their website, choose the store you want to shop at and you will earn cash back on anything  you buy and best of all they have double rewards for the holidays right now!

Last but not least, here are my deals that I got with not many coupons. I recently started shopping a lot at Walgreens and RiteAid, never did before I started couponing because Walmart is always cheaper then them, or so I thought! Both Walgreens and RiteAid have a program where you earn money towards future purchases, with these rewards and very few coupons I am always able to score a lot of free goodies. My last trip Walgreens I ended up with 2 triamenic cold medicines (my poor boy is sick), 3 life waters, 3 smart waters, 3 blistex, 2 small Folgers coffees, 11 carmex lotions (1oz trial size) and a lollipop for my son, I paid approx. $4.00 in cash by breaking up my transactions to get the maximum amount of reward dollars and using previously earned reward dollars, plus I still had $9.00 in reward dollars to save until next week when the new deals come out! The only thing I had coupons for was the cold meds and the carmex. RiteAid is the same way, my last trip there I got about $50 of stuff and paid $1.92 in tax and for what my rewards didn't cover, this included 4 boxes of dishwasher detergent tablets, 3 laundry soaps, 3 hand sanitizers, 3 boxes of Kleenex, 2 anti-frizz hair things and 1 Zicam... the only things I had coupons for here was the dishwasher detergent, Kleenex and the hair stuff.

The last trip I'm going to talk about was this months big grocery shopping trip. King Soopers is having a buy 10 and save $5.00 sale and I really stocked up on a lot of stuff! Plus I had hardly any coupons for the stuff I did buy, I got some meat, milk and cheese which is always expensive and we go through a lot here. My total before any savings was $322.29, I saved only $36.95 with my coupons but with in store savings and the buy 10 save $5.00 sale I save an additional $142.43 which means I paid only 142.91 on over $300 in groceries! Some of the things I did not have coupons for were Annie's mac and cheese, normally $1.65 on sale for just 69 cents when you buy 10, you can mix and match with the other items in that sale so I got 45 boxes of the various kinds, bumble bee tuna pouches, normally over $1.00 each, 49 cents in the sale, I got 35, Vitamin water, my sons favorite, normally over $1.00 on sale for 49 cents, I got lot, not sure how many but the bottom shelf of the fridge is half vitamin water and half yoplait yogurt, which I also got on sale plus had a coupon. I purposefully did not use any of my coupons that gave me free items or any super good coupons so I could prove that you can save over 50% on your grocery bill by just shopping sales. Hope this inspires you to clip some coupons and shop some sales :)

OK I think that is a long enough post to make up for not posting in so long, I'm off to get my freebies and use my super good coupons now, I'll hopefully make another post soon :)