If you look to the right of this post, you will see a row of links from our other blogs detailing the projects and recipes we've been working on this month.
Last weekend, I posted about a great deal I got at CVS: I earned over $5 buying 7 packs of Finish dishwasher tabs. Thanks to my mother, I will get another 7 for free. How did we do this? We combined a sale ($3.00) with a high-value coupon ($2.25 off each box- and bought using a coupon-clipping service) and a rewards deal (spend $20 before coupons and get $10 back).
I am pretty well stocked in general, but I do keep an ongoing list of needs to ensure I keep an eye out for deals as they come along. I love scoring a great find- however, I don't bother running out and getting something that won't be needed for a long time, even if I can get it for free. My Google Reader will often have 300 posts in it from the deal blogs I watch by the end of the day, and most of them go ignored by me. I have 3 years worth of expensive razor blade refills for my husband that took quite a few trips this past spring (and only $9!), and I have no plans to add to that.
The most important part of deal hunting is knowing what you have, what you need now, and what you are going to need. I keep my Word document with my list open as I peruse the deal posts and make my menu for the week. You also need to have a basic idea what the sales cycles are for the different things you need (great links about this here and here.) I know that barely a week goes by that I can't find free toothpaste or toothbrushes. I've done this long enough to know that every 6-8 weeks I can get Cheerios for as low as $0.48, and every three months I can stock up on brand name peanut butter for less than $0.40. Before, I used to keep a price book, like the one in the Tightwad Gazette. I highly recommend keeping one for your most-often needed items at first, and then expand from there.
Once I have a good idea what is the lowest price I can find, plus what is the sales cycle, I can make a good guess about how many I need to stockpile at one time. I usually get 6 jars of peanut butter at once.
For this week's deal, I knew it would be a hot-ticket item, and these high-value coupons only come out once a year, so I got there as soon as the doors opened the first day of the sale. They weren't stocked up, so I went to another store. Yes, I am willing to drive to multiple stores within a reasonable distance for a really good deal. Yes, I got a big thrill scoring almost a year's supply for free. Yes, this is how I spent my Saturday morning.
What do you need to hunt for over the next few months?
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