With only a week left in the year, I am entering the last few lines of my 2010 spreadsheet. Unlike some frugal livers, I do not track my grocery savings (I'll go into that in a minute), however, I do track the rewards that I receive through out the year. Examples of these rewards are:
Register Rewards, Extra Care bucks, Pinecone Survey payments, Global Opinions panel (synovate) payments, Mypoints Gift cards, SBKC giftcards, misc. survey payments/rewards, rebates, and gift cards that I receive as comps (as a result of a letter to a company or from vendors that I work with). I have also included this year the magazine.com gift certificates that you can cash out (check out this article for more info).
With one more week, and not too much time on my hands to do surveys or anything else that is an income generator, I have totalled up our 2010 spreadsheet and our YTD rewards total is: $1746.20.
It seems incredible, but I take advantage of a lot of quick, easy survey program and rewards program I can. I also do not purchase items that generate an Extra care buck or a Register reward just to obtain free stuff. If it is an item my family doesn't use, even if it's free, it stays at the store. We only bring home what we can use.
The reason that I do not track my grocery savings is that I only buy items that are on sale and/or meet my target price for an item.
Example: my target price for cereal is less than $1.00 per box. Meaning if I cannot find cereal that fits my target price, I do not buy it, even if it's on my grocery list. We will eat something else for breakfast that fits in my target price (eggs, protein bars, etc.). For us cereal is a real treat. I only buy specific kinds of cereal (low sugar, high fiber). Thanks to recyclebank.com kashi coupons, I have been able to get kashi cereal for .26/box at target recently. And the boxes of cereal have more recyclebank.com codes in them!
By using a target price system, it's not fair for me to say, "I saved $150 on groceries this month!" because if it weren't for the target price I was searching for, I wouldn't have purchased the items at all. That's the reason we don't eat a lot of meat- it's really hard to hit the target price on meat when there are no coupons (90% of the time) and meat sales are few and far between. We don't have a large freezer or room in our home for a chest freezer, so I cannot take advantage of "buy a whole cow" sales.
We do stock up on seasonal meats- Prime rib near Christmas, corned beef at Saint Patrick's Day. I also shop almost exclusively in the discounted meat section.
We only buy food that we will eat- if an item is free, but we won't eat it, or if it is not healthy, we won't bring it home. Boxed meal kits, Fruit by the foot type snacks, most lunch meats, most frozen already made meals, most ready to drink juices are all types of food that we don't eat. If a product is new and there is a rebate, I will try it. I would rather leave the coupon on the shelf and share the coupon with someone who will eat the product and enjoy it than cart it home and have it sit in my kitchen, waiting to expire.
My goal is to save money and live better.
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