Tag Archives: budgeting

Living in an apartment in a big city, I’m lucky to have a pantry at all. I’m lucky to have a dishwasher. I’m lucky to have a washer/dryer. Life in tiny apartments when you have a family can be tight. But it also means less square footage for them to make a mess in, right?

But if you’re trying to save money on your groceries, the teeny living space can make problems. A membership to Costco or BJ’s or Sam’s Club? Not super helpful when there’s nowhere to put your giant haul.

Find an amazing deal on paper towels? Where do you plan to put them?

Also, the shelves suck.

If you’re going to “stockpile” without much space you have to pick and choose. When it comes to big products like toilet paper, paper towels, cereal and others, you have to pay extra close attention to the sales to make sure you snag the best deals.

But you can do a lot of stockpiling of smaller items. I’ve got only two shelves in our small linen closet devoted to bathroom products (there’s no space in the bathroom, of course) but I have a nice stockpile of bandages, razors, tampons and toothpaste in there. (Seriously, I haven’t bought toothpaste in a year! And I obviously haven’t been using tampons for a while, but I’m glad I won’t have to buy any once I need them again.) These are things that’ll last you a while without taking up a lot of space.

Another thing I’ve started stockpiling: concentrated laundry detergent. Wisk puts out great coupons, but I don’t have room for a giant container of it. Lucky for me, they’ve started putting out Wisk 2X, which is nice and tiny. Between those Wisks and my all Small & Mighty’s that I got for a steal, I have enough detergent to last us a long time and it takes up barely any space in my pantry.

You may notice one thing: everything I’ve talked about so far is a non-food item. I admit that for me it’s easier to stockpile items where I don’t have to worry about an expiration date that comes in the next year. It’s already hard to stockpile in your refrigerator or freezer. My fridge is small and my freezer space is miniscule. Oh, how I wish I had one of those giant freezers like we kept in the garage when I was a kid. I could actually stockpile things like bread and meat and freeze extra portions of all my big soups and stews. Now I can only do a little of that at a time.

As for my pantry, I mostly make sure I always have a little of everything. So when pasta gets marked down under a dollar, I won’t buy 10, but I buy 1 every time it happens. That way I’ll never have the Bug demanding “pasta” without having any in the cupboard. And I can make ziti on a whim if I want to. Same goes for sales on canned tomatoes and beans.

We don’t need 10 jars of mustard. We go through one or two a year, maybe. So it’s worth it for me to wait for the best sale/coupon matchup so I can keep just one or two around in the pantry.

Be aware of those pesky expiration dates. Salad dressing coupons can give you great deals… but if you go through dressing slowly like we do, you don’t want more than one or two extras or else you’re out of luck and you’ll have to toss them.

So if you don’t have room in your house for all those items you’d like to stockpile and if you don’t have enough mouths to feed to make sure you’ll be emptying out your pantry on a regular basis, you can still keep a smart stash that will keep you saving money AND space.

It was a busy week this week!

Part of my weekly coupon ritual is to sit down with my three local circulars and write down every sale on something I might buy. I know it sounds kind of cumbersome (it is a little cumbersome) but when I’m done I have just that one piece of paper and I can figure out where I’m best off shopping for the week and what I should pick up while I’m there. And I always bring the paper with me to the store in case something on the shelf isn’t marked correctly or rings up wrong at the register. I also make sure I note on the paper if I have a coupon for the item in my binder.

Yes, it takes time, but it also means that I’m really familiar with the prices of things. It means I know this “deal” for grapes at 2.99 a pound is not even close to a real deal. And it means I can take a second to think about whether Buy One Get One Free chicken breasts is a better deal than chicken breasts for $1.99 a pound.

It also means I’m way less tempted to just buy whatever when I’m at the store. My list is ready to go and doesn’t need any changing, even if something looks enticing.

How do you make the best of a small space?

It’s been a long time since I’ve done a coupon post. Probably because I took a complete break from coupons while I had morning sickness and it takes a while to get back into the swing of things.

As usual, I’m all about making couponing easy and accessible for regular people who don’t have the time or patience to go the extreme route. Today I want to focus on one thing in particular:

You do not have to stockpile.

Seriously. You don’t. That’s where the serious time and energy goes. It requires getting multiple coupons from multiple sources, possibly using clipping services, etc. Plus the grocery trips themselves can be hellish when you’ve hunted down a great deal only to find they are all out of stock.

I don’t stockpile for a few reasons.

1. I don’t have the time.
2. I don’t have the patience.
3. I don’t have the space in my small pantry.
4. The only things I could stockpile are health/hygiene/cleaning products, since the foods we eat tend to change and we focus more on fresh produce.

I’ve talked before about how to make coupons fit with a non-processed diet, including plenty of meat, dairy and produce.

And I also want to make it clear that you can have mini-stockpiles. For example, I have enough toothpaste to last for a good year. Because toothpaste sales and coupons are pretty easy to find and I may buy one every few weeks, which is a lot faster than we use them. Plus toothpaste doesn’t take up much space and I’m not hugely picky about brands, so it’s not a big deal to keep a stash. (I also have a decent stockpile of tampons…… which will be gathering dust for quite some time.)

So what can you expect when you have a mostly normal grocery trip with basic couponing included? I save about 20-40% per grocery trip. Which is no small feat when you consider how much stuff my toddler eats that NEVER goes on sale or gets coupons, and how much milk and juice we go through. (Lots of fruit. Raisins are insanely expensive. And I get these all-natural chicken nuggets that never seem to get cheap. Ever.)

I like my weekly grocery savings. I tend to stay rather faithful to one store in particular, they’re close, they have good deals, AND they’re printing some amazing catalinas (checkout coupons) that aren’t brand specific. Stuff like $1.50 off your next Detergent Purchase. Oh, I love those.

But I do like to get in a real serious coupon trip every now and then. The funny thing is that it’s the little ones where I’m most successful, they don’t take a lot of planning, and they usually involve the Drugstore. CVS is not only incredibly close to my house, but their Extra Bucks program seems to be the most reliable and useful one around.

My most recent success involved only 2 items. I didn’t make a huge run, it was just a tiny one. In fact, I ruined my own possible success by throwing in some non-sale items. (A wipe for my glasses cuz they’re always dirty, and a soda because it is my grocery shopping reward for myself.)

My items were:

(Soda not shown because it was consumed shortly upon leaving the store.)

These were items we NEEDED. Not stuff I was picking up just for kicks. We were out of ibuprofen and if you’ve ever been pregnant, you know Zantac is a way of life with pregnancy heartburn.

Lucky for me, I had coupons for both. Advil had some pretty decent coupons over the summer, I had an awesome $2 coupon, which is great, especially compared with other pain relievers. And I’d just clipped a $1 Zantac coupon that day.

I also had $4 in ExtraBucks to cash in.

And there was a special to get $5 ExtraBucks with a purchase of Zantac over a certain size.

Then I went into the store and hit the kiosk to get my coupons for the week. Lo and behold, I got one for a stomach relief purchase for $4 and another $1 I could use for the Advil.

The elements combined and it was beautiful.

My purchases were $19.99 and $7.99 at regular price. With coupons and deals, I saved $17.80.

That’s 64% savings. It may not be the free items you see with extreme couponers, but I will take it, thank you very much. (Of course, my savings was less since I added on about $6 in extra items cuz I didn’t think about posting until afterwards, in which case this would be a much more pic-friendly post.) Oh, and don’t forget, I also left with a $5 ExtraBucks in my hot little hand.

The coupon experts will tell you that the drug stores are where the big dogs get their deals. I’ve been hesitant to take them on for a few reasons.

1. Selection. Groceries take up less than 1 aisle. You get a lot of options when you’re looking for something like cold medicine, but hardly any for a lot of everyday buys.
2. Size. Some of them are great, but in the city most of them are teeny tiny things that I hate having to navigate through.
3. Staff. Seriously, it is a very rare event when I go to a drugstore and don’t have to wait in an insanely long line for the only cashier working a register. They want people to buy lots of stuff but they’re really not staffed for it most of the time.

But I’m singing a new tune since I started my coupon binder. One of my secret reasons for not going was that too many deals involved money to be used on your next purchase. I lose these constantly.

Then I found my coupon binder and voila! All my extra cash at my fingertips.

So lately I’ve started playing the drugstore game. Not a lot. Just dipping my toe in. By having small, targeted drugstore trips I get to take advantage of great deals without getting so frustrated. (I’ve also been going late at night, so there’s less lines. And I head out of town a bit to bigger locations.)

Here’s why it’s the source of the best deals:

Cash back + Coupons + Sale = Cheap, Free, or possibly even some money in your pocket.

So an item gets marked down. AND they offer you a receipt for cash. (Extra Bucks or Register Rewards.) All of that is great, but even better is that you can pile coupons on top of it.

Keep in mind, drugstore couponing is different than grocery store couponing. You’ll need extra organization and planning. You’ll also need additional time for trips. On the plus side, if you put all your circulars together, you’ll be able to compare more deals to make sure you get the most savings.

So let’s examine my CVS trip Sunday night.

Here’s my haul (just pretend I’m The Coupon Goddess):

The price? $33.10. Doesn’t sound very impressive, does it? Not a ton of items, still a substantial amount of money. But consider this: at full price, the same amount would buy me the batteries, the Tampax and the Swiffer. Nothing else. These are high price items, the ones I hate buying because just one or two things adds so much to my bill. (Oh, and also there were some Twizzlers I got for Eric which he had already started devouring before I could take the picture.)

I didn’t get all crazy sale stuff. The brush was because I’ve lost mine. Not on sale.

Let’s see some examples of the trifecta of savings:

Shampoo

1. On sale, 2 for $5.97. That’s $2.01 in savings for both.
2. I had a coupon for $1 off.
3. $2 Extra Bucks for purchasing 2.

So instead of paying $7.98, I pay $2.97. This is our normal shampoo, didn’t even buy something special, just something I was buying anyway.

Tampax

1. On sale for $7.99, savings of $2.
2. Coupon for $2 off.
3. $2 ExtraBucks.

Used to be $9.99, I get it for $3.99. I’ve been really scoring on tampons lately, and these big packs are my favorite. Another thing I buy all the time.

Toothpaste

1. On sale for $2.77, savings of $0.22.
2. Coupon for $1.
3. ExtraBucks for $2.77.

Normally $2.99. I paid… -$1. Yup, I made money buying toothpaste. If only I had my old coupon binder which was loaded with Colgate coupons.

Keep in mind, I still just buy things we use and will need. I’m stockpiling just a teensy bit with the cleaning supplies because we’re moving soon and I know we’ll need them. But the toothpaste, shampoo, batteries all go really fast so it’s always good to have them around.

All in all, I spent $33.10. Original price of my items was $60.19. But that leaves out one important thing:

Oh right. Those things that look like receipts but are actually dollar bills sitting in my coupon binder.

$9.77 in ExtraBucks. So actually I spent $23.33 on my little haul.

I also made a quick run to Walgreens the same night. They had the best milk prices–over $1 cheaper than grocery store–and we drink a lot of it. And I had a shiny $3 coupon for razors. The razors were on sale everywhere, but Walgreens definitely had the best deal. A good price, a great coupon and $2 Register Rewards for next time.

The Extreme Coupon folks have been known to clean out the drugstores on Sunday morning when the new prices start. That will never be me. It’s rare I buy more than 2 of anything. But just because you don’t go that crazy doesn’t mean you can’t do quite well with a little planning. There were plenty of ExtraBucks deals I didn’t use and plenty of sales I skipped because I am trying to keep from bringing too much stuff into the house before we moved.

Oh, and one more thing. If you’re a regular CVS shopper, I’d recommend getting one of their little reusable bag tags for 99 cents. Every 4 times you use it, you get $1 back in ExtraBucks. It may take me a month to get that dollar, but I’ll use it. And if I’m going to pop in for something like a prescription, you can bet I’ll pull out my reusable bag and have them scan it.

I think I’ve found a drugstore routine that works for me. I bet you can, too.