When in the store- even if I don’t need meat right now I always go by the meat and deli cases.  As items near their best by or sell by dates stores start to mark them down little by little.  The closer that sell by date- the greater the markdown

Yesterday I found these Turkey Hot Dogs for just .72 after the Buy 1 Get 1 Free sale at Harris Teeter and the $2 store coupons attached to them!

Need to save more to feed the carnivores in your life? Check out these other tips to saving on meat;

13 Ways to Save on Meat

Save Money: Cut it Yourself

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Follow MoolaSavingMom.com’s board Easter Egg Designs on Pinterest.

Easter is coming up and that means it’s time to decorate eggs!

I’ve rounded up some great ideas to make your Easter Eggs extra special!  Share your ideas with us!

Every Sunday I get similar questions to this one, “I am so Mad!  I picked up four newspapers this morning and got home only to find that someone had stolen my coupons!  The store I bought them from wouldn’t take them back and now I am out that money!  Is there anything I can do? “

My answer is always the same, “I’m sorry there isn’t anything you can really do.”

There are a few reasons why your newspaper might be missing coupons:

1. It was never there to start with.  Newspapers are given inserts based on the amount of home delivery subscribers they have.  If a newspaper has 100,000 home delivery subscribers Smart Source and Red Plum may provide them 115,000 insert packets.  So after home delivery papers are stuffed with the inserts there are 15,000 left.  The newspaper might print 30,000 additional papers to put in stores and vending boxes.  So right away there are 15,000 newspapers that are put out that have no coupons in them.One of my local papers only gets enough Red Plum to put into the newspapers for those in the city.  The rest of us outside the city only get Smart Source…so I stopped buying that paper!
2. There was a mechanical error. Have you ever gotten a newspaper that had 1 page of an insert and then nothing else? Many newspapers are now put together by machines.  If it gets off rhythm then several papers may have different pieces of inserts.
3. Someone stole them.  We know the value of coupons and sadly so do some unethical people.  They will open boxes and take the inserts (if there were any to start with) either to use themselves or to sell.

So how do we ensure that we get the coupons that we are expecting?

[Read more…]

My husband laughs that I am a serial mover…I get bored with a house and then I start house hunting…and we end up moving. Ok that was the old me.…now I am in my forever home…but I’ve learned a LOT about how to move!

I thought I’d share some of the things I learned about where to get the best boxes for moving!

• The boxes you can buy in the stores (Lowes Home Improvement, etc) can be as high as $9 each for wardrobe boxes!  OUCH.   The smallest ones I could find at Lowes Home Improvement was $1.74.

• There are some boxes that are better than others at the grocery store.  I thought for sure I wanted toilet paper and paper towel boxes- they should be big enough to stuff it full of lots of things right?  However they are the worst boxes to get from the grocery store.  They are perforated to make it easy to tear them open and reusing them is risky because those perforations can rip open and drop your belongings everywhere!  And paper towels and bath tissue is actually pretty light…..  Turns out that Detergent and Cat Litter, pasta sauce boxes are often the sturdiest and therefore the best for moving!  Also ask if you can have the boxes that heavy fruit comes in such as apples and bananas.

• Restaurants are also a great place to ask for boxes but steer clear of any that had meat in them you don’t want to move your favorite towels in a box full of chicken “juices”.

• Think of places with HEAVY items- book stores are also a great place to ask for boxes.  Books are HEAVY and so those boxes are built well! ABC/Liquour stores are amazing too!  Ours keeps a big pile right by the door 🙂

• Look in your office- all that paper!  Those paper boxes are perfect for moving.  The lids slide on – no tape!!

• Check Marketplace and OfferUp.  The last thing you want to do after moving is have to break down and recycle all those boxes!  A quick search of Marketplace showed about 20 listings in my area.  Keep in mind that they’ve already been used and may not be in the best condition.

• Ask your movers!  We contracted with a moving company to load and unload our belongings – they offered FREE boxes from houses that had the full service packing and unpacking services.  SCORE!  They even had wardrobe boxes and glasses boxes!

What tips do you have for getting GOOD boxes for free or cheap?

One thing I’ve seen in lots of “How to Coupon Guides” is to stock up for 6 weeks because that’s the sales cycle.  “Every sale comes back around every 6 weeks- so only buy enough to last you that long.” is common advice but I’ve never felt that it was 100% accurate so I decided to do some tracking.

We picked 22 commonly purchased items and tracked their prices (and we continue to track them) for the last 9 weeks at 2 stores: Harris Teeter & Lowes Foods. We only tracked the SALE prices because adding in coupons would have made it really complicated.

Let’s start with Shredded Cheese at Harris Teeter

In the past 9 weeks the prices followed this pattern for the 8 oz bag of Harris Teeter cheese:

So you can see that the lowest it has been in the last 9 weeks was $1.30.  If we bought enough to last 6 weeks – on week 7 we’d be paying $3.25.  However on week 10- the price will be dropping to Buy 2 Get 3 Free making each bag $1.30 again. So that’s 9 weeks in between- not 6. [Read more…]

Here’s a quick Thrifty Tip for you!

When you are running an instant savings promotion – have the cashier ring those items up first and subtotal the transaction.   Be sure that the instant savings is deducted before proceeding with the rest of your order.  This allows the issue to be quickly spotted and resolved.

If we wait until the entire order is rung up and totaled before trying to find a single line item and ensuring that a promo came off.

This works well especially with promos we know there are issues with (like the current Harris Teeter ConAgra promotion)

See more Thrifty Tips

Several times I have been in stores and noticed that shoppers were looking at what was a good deal but bypassing it because there was no sales tag on the item. The item was advertised in the flyer or I posted about a great deal here on MSM but no one was taking the item to the register. Or asking me why their store didn’t have the Finish B1G1 at Harris Teeter or the Carnation Instant Breakfast wasn’t $3.99 (in fairness I did have to add a note to the Dunkin Donuts- originally I missed that only the holiday flavors were on sale- sorry about that!)

The reason was because they didn’t see a sales tag so they just left it on the shelf and moved on- assuming it was not on sale.

Sales tags don’t determine what the price will be at the register.  Sales tags get missed every week due to the the high number that are changed in every store each week.  Some misguided shoppers take the sales tags in order to get a raincheck (or a super excited 18 month old waddling down the aisle).  Once they are taken down most stores are unable to reproduce the tag to replace it and shoppers for the rest of the week mistakenly think that the item isn’t on sale.

If you think that an item should be on sale for whatever reason- take it to the register.  Ask the cashier (or at customer service) to “price check” the item.  They can scan the item and see what the sale price is.   If it doesn’t ring up for what you expected then they can take the item off your order and if it does ring up on sale- SCORE!