My parents just had a new roof put on their house this week.  It’s a lovely roof, and it will hopefully have the benefit of not leaking.   The thing about roofs is that they’re not cheap, not even a little bit.  My dad, however, was pretty creative about the whole deal and has saved them quite a lot of money.  I hope I remember all of this correctly.

  1. After shopping around, he ended up buying all his supplies at Lowe’s.
  2. He did a little networking in advance with a contracting friend of his, who got him a discount on the price of materials.   10%? I’m not sure on the exact amount.  They were possibly already on sale, too.
  3. Lowe’s was running a special promotion where you got $100 gift card back by mail on every $400 shingle purchase.  He purchased the shingles in five transactions, which got him $500 in gift cards to spend on the rest of the supplies.  This stuff was actually purchased a while ago, and then they were waiting on the roofers to become available, but coincidentally, they scheduled their time to be last week… just as all five gift cards were arriving in the mail. Excellent timing!
  4. So now it’s time to buy the rest of the supplies, which are going to cost a small fortune.  He noticed in the sales paper last week that they were selling Gatorade by the case on sale for $9.97, and there were $10/$50 coupons inside the package. So, he goes out and buys a grand total of thirteen cases, using the coupons inside to pay for all of the remaining roofing supplies.  He split everything into separate transactions of $50 in order to maximize savings.  He had already paid the $10 for the Gatorade, of course (some of which he was able to use $10/$50 coupons on!) so in summary–a dozen cases of Gatorade for free! (One case was missing the card.)
  5. My dad being my dad, it’s less than a week later and he has already sold eight cases of Gatorade for $6 each.  That’s a $48 profit on the Gatorade, which brings his costs for the roof a little lower again.
  6. Future plans for the remaining five cases include drinking it and possibly selling it cold at the next yard sale.

I loved that. :)  Creative couponing at its best!  It would have been better if there had been $10/$50 coupons available without having to buy the Gatorade, but there weren’t any around just now, so it was a lot better than nothing! It generally takes me longer than that to make $50 of profit from coupons. ;)

Having said that, I really, really don’t recommend roofing your house as a money-saving technique… ;)