Anyway, we bought one at Max & Erma’s before Christmas year before last. Actually, I think we bought two. A few months later, we went to use the last one and pulled into the parking lot and…it was gone. Gone! They closed both of the locations near us in one weekend, along with a bunch of others around the country. Anyway, I came home and looked for the nearest location and found one in Cincinnati. Driving two hours just to eat dinner at a regular old chain restaurant? No thank you.  So I did what anyone would have done–I stuck the card in my wallet in the event that we found ourselves somewhere near a Max & Erma’s, and promptly forgot about it.

Anyway, it struck a nerve with me recently, when I was cleaning out my wallet, and I noticed on the back of the card that they would deduct $2 per month after two years of inactivity. That’s coming up pretty soon, and I’d just as soon not watch $25 go down the drain, so I called the number on the back of the card. They tried to direct me to another location, but when it turned out that it was so far away, she gave me the phone number of their parent company and suggested that they would be able to reimburse me (which is what I was hoping for.)  I had a hard time getting someone on the phone, as the customer service guy never answered his phone or returned a message, so I kept calling and finally, this week, he returned my call.

(I finally inquired politely in my last voice mail as to when the appropriate time to call this number would be, as I had made several phone calls and no one ever answered the phone or returned voice mails. Four or five days later, I actually got a phone call! Never give up. ha!)

The point of the story, of course, is that they’re sending me a $25 check for my worthless-to-me gift card.  If this ever happens to you, keep it in mind that they may be willing to work with you if you give it a little effort.  Alternately, you could try selling it on eBay or one of the gift card swap sites, but I  hated to lose part of the value if I didn’t have to.

p.s. It’s not weird to just suddenly post something after six months, is it? ;)

So, this post goes out to anyone that this policy change affects.  Don’t buy stuff you can’t afford.

hehehe.

Tickets were $1,1013.69 each.   There are three of us, so that means the total cost is:  $3,041.07.

My lovely in-laws are contributing $1,000 to the cost of the trip, so my Phase One  Goal is $2,041.  If I reach that, I’ll readjust my goal to $3,041 instead.

My rules are that I can count anything that brings in income, most of which is going to be the sale of my stockpile but can also include bank bonuses or online offers or  similar.  I would allow myself to include profit from shopping except it would be too much trouble to calculate, so I probably won’t do that.   If I was smart, I would add an additional rule that the cost of all meals eaten outside of the home have to come out of this money (thereby eliminating my desire to go out to eat…) but I’m not quite crazy enough for that.

So far, I am 27% of the way there! That’s largely due to the online offer I did for a $500 gift card, but it’s nice to get a good start!  I’ll try to keep you updated on my progress.  In the meantime, anyone want a razor? Some Theraflu? KNOX? :)

Also, my husband sold a gun item for $300 but he won’t let me count that money because he originally decided to sell it to replace my laptop last year.  Which… awwww! But it would look really nice in my spreadsheet. Yes, of course I have a spreadsheet…

There are things other than health and beauty and overpriced junk foods at drugstores, you know. :)

The funny thing is that before I went shopping yesterday, I spent an hour sorting books in the sunroom.  We switched our bedroom with Evelyn’s and in our new room, we don’t have a logical place for the bookcase that used to be in there.  We were trying to figure out where to put it and couldn’t come up with a good place for it–that’s how it ended up in our room to begin with.  So, I suggested that we consolidate our books until they fit on two bookcases instead of three instead, and move the third bookcase to the basement and use it for general storage.  Most of these books won’t get read again anyway, so why are we holding on to them?  So I spent the morning looking at my books and thinking, “Can I justify the space in my home for this book?” and the afternoon buying two new books.  :)

Also, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Blink for their eye drops.  Blink has had several different promotions over the last couple of years that made them free, so I had a bottle in my storage area but had never tried them.  I woke up with a terrible eye irritation. I’ve been using Visine and eye washes and stuff all morning, and while the Visine helped a little bit, it stung like crazy and then finally I noticed that it was expired.  (Not sure if expiration dates on eye drops are that important? But I don’t know for sure.)  Anyway, I happened to see a bottle of Blink sitting around a little while later and thought I’d try it and it has helped IMMENSELY.  My eye feels better than it’s felt all day.  So, YAY BLINK.  And also, I would like to note that people used to ask me all the time why stores/companies do these sales that involve giving their product away for free.  This is why.  If this drop helped my eye this much, I would pay for it gladly.  If I run out and I am buying more eye drops, I will remember this and I will purchase accordingly.

With a coupon, of course.  I may have suddenly switched brand loyalties but I haven’t, you know, become a different person. ;)

Now, my apologies to those certain persons who have nagged me about not updating this blog.  It has occured to me, now that Evelyn is no longer napping and I don’t really have a good chunk of time in the afternoon to blog, that I don’t really enjoy making certain kinds of posts.  Although I’m thankful to the bloggers who do post daily deals and coupon matchups, I don’t like committing to that sort of posting schedule, and I don’t like feeling like I am just reposting every single thing I see online.  And, I do enjoy posting photos of my shopping trips, but I would enjoy it MUCH more if I didn’t feel like I should do it every time.  I don’t know, those things sort of stress me out and then I don’t post anything.

So, maybe now I will feel less stress about posting, now that I have officially given up on those things.  I mean, I wasn’t DOING them already so there’s no reason to feel guilty. :)

When the waitress (finally) arrived to ask for drink orders, I asked her about the promotion.  She said that she thought it had already ended, but it was still in the computer so she’d bring me a menu of the eligible items.  So she did, and we ordered food (which turned out to be quite good!) and we had a lovely lovely evening.

Also, before this dinner event, I sent my husband to CVS to pick up Pepsi while I went to Walgreens with the baby, and I actually combined this lovely evening with drugstore shopping. How much better does it get?  I’m too embarrassed to post a picture of the heaping pile of stuff we bought at Walgreens, though. I had a LOT of RRs from the Bayer monitors to use.  It mainly went for Pepsi products (we are stocked up through approximately August, and we drink quite a lot of it..if that tells you anything) and a humidifier.

Anyway, my point is–it doesn’t hurt to ask, in situations like this.  The worst they’re going to say is no, and you just might get what you want.  And for the record, this was just posted about at slickdeals so I don’t think that it’s an ended promotion, regardless of what our waitress said.  Feel free to try it out in your area.  I was pleased to see that the options on the menu were actually good ones–it usually feels like those special menus have less appealing entrees than the real menu.

I don’t track any sort of financial savings/earnings.

I used to. I used to have this super-complicated budget spreadsheet that I maintained for a couple of years.  I split up every dime we earned and logged it into this spreadsheet by date and category.  I was splitting up every receipt into about ten different categories… and calculating tax for each one. It was super-cool and also a lot of work.  The reason I quit doing it is that I kept falling behind.  I was still doing it when I started couponing, and splitting up those receipts became absolutely impossible. I mean, I’d have a receipt that said that I paid $46.23.  Then I would have to remember that I was getting $35 in rebates, $2 in Register Rewards and I paid using a gift card that I had earned from the previous month’s rebates, so my out-of-pocket was sort of zero, but sort of $7.23.  Then I would have twelve different items in that order, and how could I easily say what each one really cost?

I’ve thought for a long time about how I could come up with any sort of useful statistics about this hobby. I’ve tried using several of the spreadsheets that other deal bloggers use.  None of them make sense for my particular situation–namely, I don’t buy this stuff just for myself. I am still planning on doing my yard sales this year.  Most of the time, I don’t even know when I bring something home if I’ll keep it or if I’ll sell it or give it away.  Plus, I buy a lot of stuff that would artificially  inflate my numbers.  For example, the regular price on a diabetes monitor is like $80.  My receipts will tell me that I have saved $129.98 or something silly, when in fact, I haven’t really saved anything.  I wouldn’t buy that item if it didn’t give me some sort of special benefit, and I’d never pay that much for one even if I did buy one.

And yet, I think I’m missing out by not tracking more of my expenditures and incomes.  If you don’t have a goal or a way of measuring a goal, then you’re not going to give it everything you’ve got, right? So, my new goal is to break even, so to speak.  My plan is pretty simple–I want the things that I buy (groceries, toiletries, household supplies, etc) for both myself and for the purpose of reselling to balance out against the income that I generate.  I’m going to count most things that I would buy at a drugstore or Wal-Mart or grocery store, excluding say, appliances or electronics or car maintenance supplies  or  maybe gifts.  For drustore shopping, I will count out of pocket expenses only–thus increasing the likelihood that I will actually keep up with this.  The Register Rewards and Extra Care Bucks will be discounted from the calculations–I mean, I’ll use them in future transactions, thereby bringing the cost down, so it evens out in the end.  Rebates I will add back into my pool of available money as income, just because it will be simpler that way.  Other income will include things like online offers, credit card dividends, yard sales, eBay sales, freelance work, etc.

This method clearly wouldn’t work for someone dedicated to a firm monthly budget, or who uses the envelope system.  In our house, though, it’s just not as set in stone that we will spend a certain amount on groceries in one week or month anymore.  We used to have $300 as our food budget, but that was before coupons.

I’ll be honest with you. I have no idea if this will work, if it’s far from obtainable or if it’s way too easy.  Judging from the last working budget that we had (before couponing), this should be quite easy to accomplish, and I’ll need to adjust it to make it more challenging.  I hope!   If that happens, I’ll add categories of spendings to be included (say, restaurants) in order to make it a little more difficult.  In a way, I’d rather fail the challenge than make it too easy–at least that way, I’d still be striving to meet my goal.

I think that the benefits of this method will be that it will inspire me to work harder to both save more and earn more, and it will also allow me to track my shopping trips quickly and with a minimum of fuss.  It also makes sense, in a way, to consider all of my income-earning activities, as a stay-at-home-mom, as part of my household budget.  At the end of the day, money in and money out data should be more useful than a somewhat arbitrary number representing my savings.

I’m going to try this for a month or two and then re-evaluate, and fine-tune the goals then.  I’ll post my progress as I go.

(This same method should be used every time you shop online, too! Google for a discount code before you place your order.  It can’t hurt and might just save you some cash!)

There’s a trick to getting diapers for next to nothing, but it’s not rocket science. If I can do this, you can too. 

Concepts

1. Ditch brand loyalty.  At the end of the day, this is an item that your child is going to poop in once, and then you’re going to throw it away. It doesn’t need to be fancy.  There are always special circumstances–some children are allergic to some brands, for instance.  But, be willing to explore different brands, including store brands. (My favorite diapers are the Walgreens store brand, actually.)
2. Calculate price per diaper. Smaller sizes have more diapers per package. You can calculate the cost per diaper by dividing the price by the number of diapers per package.  That is the best way to accurately compare prices against brands.  Keep an eye on that amount to make sure you’re getting the best deal possible.
3. STOCKPILE.  That is important enough to warrant bolding and all caps!   This is really the key.  When you find a great price, buy as many as you can. Diapers can be hid all over your house, if you’re worried about the storage space.  Stick them under the crib, under your bed, in the closet, under the dresser, above the hallway closet, under the stairs, under the couch, in a closed bookcase, in the bathroom…whereever you can find a little space, add diapers.  If you end up buying too many–don’t despair!  You can take a package back to the store and exchange it for the next size up if that’s the problem, or you can add diapers in to your next baby shower gift, or you can sell your off sizes. I get $6 a package for them at yard sales (and by word of mouth) and have sold out every time. I know of people who sell diapers on Craigslist with great luck.  You just don’t want to ever run out and have to pay full price.
4. Stack a variety of promotions. Basically, you want to combine as many discounts as possible into one purchase.  You want to have a good sale, a manufacturer’s coupon, a store coupon, a purchase-based coupon (like a $5/$25), overage from other coupons in your transaction, a store rebate like Rite Aid’s Single Check Rebates, Register Rewards/Extra Care Bucks, a manufacturer’s rebate, a Caregiver’s Marketplace rebate and a partridge in a pear tree.  You won’t get all of those every time, of course, but the more things you get working for you, the better.

Methods

1. Sales. Obviously, you don’t want to pick up a pack of diapers at a convenience store.  Currently, the standard price for diapers is around ten to twelve bucks per package, with the occasional sale price of nine dollars.  Just think, if you only bought diapers at nine dollars (not  a terribly difficult thing to do, if you pay casual attention to the sales) then you’d save a lot of money over your diapering career. 
2. Manufacturer Coupons. The workhorse of diaper purchases.  Huggies and Pampers both release coupons regularly in the Sunday paper. I see more Huggies than Pampers, and usually for a better value.  There are also often printable Huggies coupons on coupons.com and similar coupon websites. 
1. Action: Sign up at the websites of all the diaper companies to get on the mailing list.  They randomly send good coupons in the mail.
2. Hint: If you don’t buy the Sunday paper and can’t find printable coupons for a particular deal, check eBay.  Paying a dollar or two for a stack of coupons that will save you ten or twenty dollars just makes good sense.
3. Store Coupons. Most stores allow you to use a store coupon AND a manufacturer coupon per item.  For example, there is a coupon for $1 off Huggies in a Walgreen’s children’s activity book found in the store.  Say that the price of the diapers is $9.  You have a coupon for $1.50 and the store coupon for $1.  This alone will make a package of diapers cost $6.50–not bad, huh?  Oh, and Walgreens usually lets you keep your store coupons to use again later… though your store might not be so kind. 
4. Purchase Coupons. Sometimes, stores put out coupons for say, $5 off a purchase of $25 or more.  Let’s imagine that, as before, the diapers are on sale at Walgreens for $9.  Just to make things easy, let’s pretend that you buy three packages.  9 x 3 = $27.  $27 – $5 ($5/$25 coupon) = $22.  We’ll use a $1.50 coupon on all three packages, and a $1 store coupon (which will come off three times at Walgreens). $22 – $1.50 – $1.50 – $1.50 – $1 – $1- $1 = $14.50.  That, folks, is $4.83 per package… less than half of the regular retail price.
5. Store Rebates. I’m including the Walgreens Register Reward system as well as the CVS Extra Care Bucks program in this category, along with the Single Check Rebates at Rite Aid, to name the three most common.  This is when you pay a certain amount for the diaper, but you get some amount of money back, either at the register via a coupon (at Walgreens and CVS) or a check in the mail (Rite Aid).  CVS had a (albeit poorly executed) promotion a few months ago that gave $5 ECBs when you purchased a package of Pampers. Combined with a coupon and a $5/$25, those were some cheap diapers!  The drugstores often have promotions that sound something like this: Buy $25 worth of [Insert Manufacturer Here] products, get $10 back!  The diapers are often just listed as one of the options. So, let’s pretend that in this case, the promotion was to spend $25 on Huggies and get $10 back, and we’ll keep using the above example (where we purchased three packages for $14.50, after coupons.)  $14.50 – $10 RR (for next purchase) = $4.50.  That’s $1.50 per pack.
1. Hint: see my posts on how to get started at CVS, Walgreens and Rite Aid!
6. Coupon Overages. If you happen to have a coupon for an unrelated item that is for more than the cost of that item, throw it into the same transaction and let that overage pay for your diapers.  For example, if you have a $3 coupon that you use on a $2 item, that extra $1 will help pay for your diapers.  This will depend greatly on your cashier and your store.  The other way to get coupon overage is to use a coupon on an item that gives you money back in the form of a coupon at the register, like Register Rewards at Walgreens, or Extra Care Bucks at CVS.  If the item is $5 and you get $3 back for buying it, and you have a coupon for $3, you’ll "make" $1. Again, that extra dollar can help pay for your diapers.
7. Caregiver’s Marketplace. I love the Caregiver’s Marketplace!  It’s basically just a simple independent rebate program that gives you cash back on the qualifying items you purchase.  Huggies diapers and training pants are some of the qualifying items.  For 2009, you get $.75 rebate for every package of diapers you buy.  All you have to do is save your receipts and send them in periodically.  Nothing to it!   So.. in the above example, we have whittled our diaper costs down to $1.50 each.  Subtract another $.75 and we have purchased three packages of Huggies for $.75 each.  I think that’s not bad!
1. Hint: see my post about this program here.

Now, I know what you’re thinking.  You can’t do that just any time you want to!  And the answer is… well, no, of course not.  Most of the time, you won’t get the stars to align just so that you can take advantage of most of these promotions at the same time… but it will happen periodically, and when it does, you want to jump on it hard so you don’t have to pay full price the next time.  Also, if you take advantage of just a few of those promotions, you’ll be doing really well!  Remember that back in item 4, we had the total down to $4.83 each–after subtracting Caregiver’s Marketplace (because that one, you CAN add in any time!) That would be $4.08 per package, and that scenario is not dreadfully uncommon. 

I’ve tried to be as thorough as possible on this, but please, if I’ve missed anything, let me know.  If you have specific questions about buying diapers for nearly nothing, I’ll be happy to answer them if I can.  I am thinking of adding a diaper-buying feature, as well–posts specifically about buying diapers on the cheap.  It may be a necessary expense, but it doesn’t have to break the bank!

So I played with numbers and we had a lot of conversations about how we couldn’t afford for me to stay home.  I had a pretty good job.  Actually, I made more than my husband did at that time, and adding me to his insurance plan would be outrageously expensive. There was no financial sense in it at all, no matter how we looked at it, but finally, we made the decision to take a leap of faith.  By stripping everything unnecessary out of our budget,  we decided that we could probably make it work until she was around two, and then we’d be pretty much broke and I’d have to go back to work.  We had a fairly respectable “margin”, as we call it, in our savings account, and we were prepared to watch it dwindle in order to finance a couple of years of me being a stay-at-home mom.

Immediately after I quit, my husband got a second job dropped into his lap.  It was an actual work-from-home job of the type you know is a scam, but it wasn’t.  It was difficult sometimes during those days, when I had a four-month old baby all day, and then M came home and still had to work, but those paychecks helped.  That lasted for a year, and then by the time it was over, he was earning more at his day job (and working longer hours, sadly) and I had begun the couponing journey.  After a while, it became more than just a hobby and became my primary form of financial household contribution.

The reason I’m writing this is because the husband and I called a business meeting yesterday during naptime, just to officially check in our finances.  I pulled out the same legal pad that still contains all of my calculations on how we could afford for me to stay home, flipped to a new page and started listing all of the assets that we have in all accounts, and added to that the value of all uncashed checks laying around. (I sound like we are just rolling in accounts and checks, don’t I?  It’s because a) I open lots of accounts for bonuses as part of my money-earning process and b) M’s job does not pay by direct deposit, even though last I checked it is 2009, and c) I get quite a few fiddly little rebate checks.)  Evelyn is over two years old now–actually, this is the same time of year I ended up quitting my job.  Not only am I still a SAHM, and not only are we not flat broke at this point, thanks to the preceding two years–we have actually saved money.  We have saved more than half again of the respectable margin that we had in the bank to begin with. We have done this, even though we originally expected that we would be losing money every month, and our calculations were, sad to say, way off to begin with.  And not only that! We have done a lot less scrimping than we had planned for, and we’ve had a lot more expensive things than we bought before. (You just don’t see coupons for generics, you know?)

And that is why I do this.  That is why I can justify spending hours a week at shopping, and planning my lists in meticulous detail, and clipping coupons and scouting for deals and bringing home mountains of items that I don’t need just to throw them in a yard sale.  It’s why I don’t have time for The Sims 3.  It’s why I will argue with a cashier over a fifty cent coupon. It’s why I subject myself to Rite Aid.  It’s why I have a mountain of papers on my desk and don’t have time to write in Evelyn’s baby book.  It’s why I drag a small child into boring stores on a regular basis and occasionally suffer dire consequences for it.  It’s why I spend Evelyn’s precious naps filling out rebate forms and printing coupons and organizing paperwork, even though I would much rather be reading or crafting or playing. It’s why there are dishes in the sink and laundry waiting to be folded.

And it’s why I get to spend every single day looking at this little face.

Fair trade.

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… ;)