Slow But Sure

Sorry I am so ridiculously slow at posting on my blog, but I promise I'll try harder. On to the important stuff, I will be teaching a coupon class on May 7 if anyone is interested. The cost will be $10 per person. Email me if you'd like to attend: omahanik@aol.com

On the short term, there are still some great Claritin coupons on Coupons.com. There is also a $1 off 2 Mars products printable on Coupons.com that makes 2 Snickers Easter eggs free or very cheap at Walgreens, depending on when you use it. Watch for the 2 for a $1 sale!! Also a good deal at Walgreens on Scott Naturals paper towels. Use a $1.50 off one printable on Scott's website with the $1.00 off one coupon in the April Walgreens booklet for a 6 pack of papertowels for $2.50.

Have a great night!

Hot Kroger Deals 3/17 through 3/23

There are some really great deals coming up this week at Kroger. Lot's of $0.50 items. Make sure you go to Ronzoni.com and print your 6 pasta coupons. They will be free starting Thursday. Ronzoni pasta will be on sale for $1.00 per box. They special for the week is buy 10, get $5 off. This makes the pasta $0.50. The coupons are for $1 off 2. That means two free boxes per coupon!! I don't have the details for all the sales that will be coming up, only speculation. I'll have some matchups tomorrow when the ad comes out!!

Also later this week I'll be posting my famous chocolate cake recipe. Quick and easy, and the best chocolate cake you'll ever eat. Promise.

I promise I'll try harder....

I haven't been very good at posting, but I promise to try to get a couple out a week. Coming soon, I'll be starting a website with my coupon overstock. A person can only use so much stuff....

Dollar General owes me money?

The plague has descended upon our house....for the past week my husband, daughter, and I have all had the flu. I don't think I've been that miserable in a long time. So on Thursday when I finally started feeling better, I decided that I needed to get out. Where do I go? To Dollar General with my coupons. I heard rumor of an unbelievable deal and had to check it out. I strolled through the store, picking up a few freebies but not really finding anything of great interest when I remembered what I had came for...Crest Whitestrips. They hide them at the front counter because apparently they frequently sprout legs. Are white teeth really important enough to shoplift for??? Anyway, the lady at the counter had 1 package. They run 4 dollars and some change and I had a $10 coupon. Luckily, the lady went to stock shelves because she looked like the manager and probably knew more than the kid she left to man the register. Let's just say, he wasn't going to win any prizes except maybe a Darwin. He rings up all my stuff and asks me to swipe my card. Being the accommodating person that I am, I did. He got this puzzled look on his face and tells me the computer didn't take my card. My total was $3.12. I explained to him that it was because he owed me $3.12 (thank you Crest!) I reached to the shelf behind me a grabbed a $3.00 bottle of body wash and handed it to him. He stared at me blankly and said "I don't understand..." Really? I asked him to please just ring it up. Again with the glazed donut look on his face her stared at me. "That will be $0.09 please." As I walked out of the store with my 3 bags of stuff and my receipt for $0.09, I could hear him telling the next customer "I don't even know what happened."
I was exhausted from my measly little shopping trip thanks to a slow recovery from the flu but you can bet I fell asleep on the couch with a smile on my face!! :)

This week, use your $3 off Gain Fabric Softener and DG should owe you about a quarter. They can't really give you the overage, so make sure you buy something to make up the difference. Have a great week and happy Valentine's Day!!

My Awesome $13 Shopping Trip = 38 items!!

I'm pretty sure the snow here is never going to end. It's that kind of snow that falls so fast that as soon as you get to the end of shoveling the driveway you have to start over because the other end has another inch on it. I'm tired of dreary snowy days, but they do have one upside....everyone stays home. I took advantage of our recent blizzard to head out to the grocery store. Don't tell my husband, but I secretly love driving in the snow so the grocery store was just my excuse. Sliding around corners in deep snow feels like Nascar in slow motion. These days, that's kind of the highlight of my excitement. I know, sad. Anyway...when I got to the grocery store, it was like entering the Twilight Zone. There was only one other customer in the whole store. You know something is off when the cashiers see that you have a giant handful of coupons and still yell "Yay!! a customer!! I'm sure I look like a crazy person when I go to the grocery store, my coupon bag is more overloaded than a kid's backpack and I stroll up and down each aisle, taking hours to shop. It's my only quite time without my husband or child, so I tend to take my time.
I'm kind of rambling here, but my point is, if you take your time, watch your coupons and the store sales, you can really get the best of your local grocery store. My favorite is Kroger because the one near me triples coupons up to $0.50. This particular shopping trip cost me $38. $25 of it was 3 packages of bacon that usually sell for $17.99 marked for death (my version of closeouts and manager specials) for $8.34 each. That leaves about $13 which got me :

2 packages of Kraft Singles
2 bottles Kraft Honey Dijon Mustard
2 bags of Mahatma flavored rice
4 Knorr Pasta Sides
2 cans Hormel Chili Master
2 boxes Zatarain's Jumbalaya Mix
2 40oz. bottles Heinz Ketchup
2 boxes Krusteaz Pancake Mix
2 bottles Frank's Hotsauce
2 bottles French's Worcestershire Sauce
6 Balance Bars
4 Reach toothbrushes
6 regular size Dove Deoderants

Yay Me!! (and Kroger)!!!

Uh-Oh!

I have come to the conclusion today that I may be in a little over my head with this coupon thing. I now have 5 subscription to our local newspaper. Five sets of coupons doesn't really seem like that much, or so I thought. However, after two and a half hours of clipping them out, I still wasn't done. It's going to take a couple weeks to get a routine but I think it will be worth it. At least I sure hope so. My husband has reminded me pretty frequently over the last week that I am very near death. He's not too happy about the money I've spent getting this little expenditure started. If it doesn't pay off in the near future, I'm pretty sure I'm going to be in some deep trouble with him.

This week I'm starting out with $40 in Register Rewards from Walgreens. I'm hoping to find some good deals there that also have RR. That way, I can purchase them while still staying close to my $40. I also have several Softsoap coupons and am planning to stock up this week. They are on sale for $0.88 at Kroger and the coupons are $0.35 which Kroger will triple making the soap free. I really need to find out Kroger's coupon policy so that I'm clear on what they are doubling or tripling these days. Kroger is very dodgy about their coupon policy. I've sent several emails to their corporate offices, but to no avail. I'm going to try my neighborhood store to get it clarified.

Have a great week and happy bargain hunting!

Coupon Crazy!

Ok, so obviously I'm not too good at blogging every day.... but I have a good reason. I was busy working on my new obsession. Anyone who know me knows that I'm kind of obsessive and usually it's about something off the wall. This time it's worthwhile, I think. COUPONS!!!!! I shouldn't have watched it, I know myself well enough that I should have seen how this would turn out. Extreme Couponing on TLC is my new bible. Those people are awesome. I want to get a pallet of Cheerios for $2.00!! I want an entire shopping cart full of toothbrushes for free!! I can do this. It is my new goal to get organized and ambitious about coupons and legally rip off every store in town for massive amounts of stuff for next to nothing.

I started this week. I got myself a binder, filled it with baseball card protector pages, printed an entire ink cartridge worth of coupons and ordered 4 issues of the Sunday paper for the next year. Crazy? probably. But I think I've started out pretty well. I bought some soy sauce at Walmart for $0.42, some pickle relish for $0.63, Motrin for $0.83, and then there's the Maalox. I don't even use Maalox, but Walgreens paid me $1.22 a bottle to take them out of the store. I made a $30 profit this week. That pays for one of my newspaper subscriptions for the year. How, you ask? Maalox was on sale for $5.09 at Walgreens this week. If you spent $30 on it, you get a $10 Register Reward. There was a coupon in the paper a few weeks ago for $5.00 off one Maalox product. With this knowledge, you find somewhere to get extra coupons. I bought 30 of them on Ebay. Armed with your coupons, you buy 6 bottles of Maalox and use 6 coupons. You end up paying $0.09 each totaling $0.54 and you have to pay the tax. For my area, it came to $2.68, but I received a $10 register reward coupon good for a week or so. Profit, $7.32 each time you do it. I had enough coupons to do it 5 times. With the cost of my coupons and the sales tax and $0.09 each, my expenses were about $20, leaving me with a $30 profit and way too much Maalox. I'm going to try to sell it on Ebay or Craigslist to make up my $20. Foolproof! I think. The trick is to find websites that alert you to the deals and then figuring out how to collect some coupons. Good luck!

Crocs Deal

I love Crocs. They are so comfy, maybe not the most fashionable, but comfy. And their website is awesome. It's one of the few websites that will let you stack discounts. Right now they are having sales of up to 70% off some styles. Use the discount code "fallship" for free shipping and "thankyou" for 20% off. I just bought the Blitzen style. They are normally $39.99, on sale for $19.99. After using the two discount codes my total was 15.99. I also shopped through Ebates so I get 7.5% back on my purchase. That's another $1.20 off. Their shipping takes about a week to a week and a half, but for that price, I'm in no hurry!
www.crocs.com
www.ebates.com

I hate snow!!

Six inches of snow, a shovel and my lower back are not a magic combination. Hello Advil! It snowed yesterday from the time I woke up until the time I went to bed. Given, there was only about a half hour in between, but man I hate snow. Yeah right, like my 2 year old would let that happen... As a child, you hate to go to bed. You could miss something important, like when your parents sit around and eat candy and play with your toys late at night (I truly believe that's what my daughter thinks is going on.) At what age does it change? Where is that point where the only thing you really love doing is going to bed? If we could all keep our childhood energy and hatred of going to bed think how much more we could accomplish in a day. It amazes me how little I seem to get done lately before I just run out of time and energy. Before I had my daughter, I don't think I realized just how time consuming children are. Five years ago, I never thought that a third of my time in a day would be spent convincing a 2 year old that vegetables are yummy. I figured it out, 1/3 of my day is spent in preparing, serving, and cleaning up from meals. Is that a productive use of my time? I could argue not. Think of all the time I could save if we ate out every night....Yay! fast food...as soon as they find some miracle that makes it all healthy!