Saving Money: Update on my Wander into the Coupon World

I clipped my first coupons two weeks ago in order to help save some money on our grocery budget.  I don’t buy a lot of processed foods so many of the items I purchased with coupons were health and beauty or cleaning related.

I found coupons in the local newspapers, on tear pads in grocery stores, and online.  I also downloaded a few apps to my iPad (Checkout51, SnapSaves, and CartSmart) to maximize my savings.  We get our store flyers on Thursday so on those days I would compare my coupons and apps to items that were on sale.  I would then write down the items that I would use at home and were 30% of the sale price or less.

My coupon purchases in the last two weeks were:

Advil – Reg $6.99 – $1.99 after coupons
Axe Shower Gel – Reg $10.98 for two –  $1.49 each after coupons
Degree Deodorant – Reg $6.98 for two – $0.79 each after coupons
Gain Detergent- Reg $5.99 – $1.97 after coupons
Gaylea Sour Cream – Reg $2.99 – Free after coupons (I made a penny!)
Glade air fresheners – Reg $3.87 for three – Free after coupons (I made two cents!)
Glade Wax Melts – Reg $5.49 – $1.49 after coupons
Hershey’s Chocolates – Reg $3.47 – Free after coupons (I made $.53!)
Kotex Tampons – Reg $14.43 for three – $0.31 each after coupons
Kraft Peanut Butter – Reg $11.98 for two – $1.99 each after coupons
Head of Lettuce – Reg $2.47 – Free after coupons
Old El Paso Kit – Reg $3.99 – $0.99 after coupons
Renee’s Mayonnaise – Reg $4.99 – $1.47 after coupons
Scrubbing Bubbles – Reg $8.98 – $0.50 after coupons
Soft Soap Hand Soap – Reg $6.98 for two – Free after coupons
TreSemme Shampoo – Reg $9.96 for two – $1.96 each after coupons
TreSemme Hairspray – Reg $5.26 – $0.47 after coupons

If I had paid the regular price for these items, it would have totalled $115.80.  After applying coupons and App discounts to sale prices, the total cost was $21.04.  That is a savings of almost 82% of the regular price!

The rest of our grocery budget went to our CSA, meat, coffee, and some frozen veggies.

I was skeptical of the cash back apps at first but now I am a huge fan, especially since they allow you to receive a discount on a product even if you have used a coupon.  Checkout 51 has been the best so far.  I have earned $17.50 cash back since opening my account two weeks ago.

Things We Learned after our First Month of Budgeting

1. Money was slipping away in areas in which we never paid attention.  Bank fees, automatic withdrawals, subscriptions, and surprise bills all took from our cash, and from other areas of our budget.  They were things we never thought about before we started budgeting and just dealt with them when we saw they had been withdrawn from the account.

2. Pets need to eat and be healthy too.  We didn’t budget for the pets.  Their food costs us about $25 per month and their vet bills are about $200 per year.  We need to add at least $500/year into our budget for the pets so that they are accounted for and we do not rob other budget categories to care for them.

3. We are cheaters.  When we wanted something we couldn’t afford, we found a way to buy it.  For Christmas we received $100 gift card for fuel.  We wanted to make a large purchase and didn’t have the cash to do it, so we traded our gift cards for $100 of our fuel money.  Or if we wanted to buy something, we would return merchandise to the store for credit to buy the things we want.  I don’t know if either of these are cheating, but it certainly felt that way.

4. (Not to point fingers) He is more of a cheater.  He would use credit and debit cards to buy coffees and donuts then still withdraw his blow money for the week.  I didn’t want to say much because I didn’t want to feel like I was nagging him.

5.  Budgeting is stressful.  While we were getting into the habit of budgeting we blamed each other a lot.  We both tried to be mature about the situation but I was blamed a lot for “taking money away” and he was blamed a lot for “spending too much”.  We are now blaming less and trying to be more of a team but it was a but rocky at first.

6.  We won’t be successful on only one income.  We have too many financial obligations to go anywhere fast on one income.  It will get done eventually, but not as quickly as we would like it to.  Therefore, we need additional family income.

7.  Some months cost more.  January was a killer month for us, in a bad way.  It was the first New Year with only one income and, to make it that much better, it had an extra week of payments!  Our car loan and my student loan are paid on a bi-weekly basis.  This month we had six payments due between these loans compared to the usual four payments which made this month cost more.

8. Friends will be upset with you at first.   We have been invited many places and on a couple vacations and we have had to decline.  Normally we would have been on board with anything, and our friends knew this, so they were upset when we couldn’t afford to do much.  Even though we have explained to them that we are budgeting, they can’t seem to grasp the idea… yet.  Hopefully once we begin to make some progress, they will also be on board with budgeting themselves.

9.  You don’t realize how much you want until you can’t have it.  We need (want) a new laptop.  Can’t have it.  We want to go to Florida. Can’t have it.  We want to stay in a cottage up north for a weekend.  Can’t have it.  We want a lift on our truck.  Can’t have it.  We want a new rug for our house.  Can’t have it.  These are all wants, not needs, that we don’t budget for.  Normally these wants would have been made into purchases without a second thought.

10.  We didn’t budget enough for some things.  We found that we were going over our grocery budget for items like milk and eggs.  We spend a lot of money on our CSA shares and are hoping that we can cut that $120/month out of our budget as of the renewal in April.  We LOVE having local organic produce delivered each week, but since we grow a lot of our own veggies in the summer, we can do without the CSA for at least the spring and summer shares.   Our second month of budgeting will be a little smoother than the first since we can work out some of the problems that we ran into.

Saving Money: Cancelling Subscriptions and saving $1250 a year

I hate to use the term “throwing our money out the window”, so, much like heat escaping from our home through drafty windows, sometimes our money quietly sneaks out through drafty areas of our budget.  One of those drafty expenses is subscriptions that are tacked onto our credit card or withdrawn from our bank account each month.  We just kind of forget they are there… or don’t even care that they are there.  Last night I went through all of our statements to see what was being charged to us each month.

Our current subscriptions as sown on our online statements:

Netflix: $7.99
JustFab.com: $39.95 (when I forget to skip the month)
2 x Equifax monitoring: $39.90
Ipsy: $16.32

Grand Total: $104.16 or $1249.96 per year!! 

I have been getting good use out of my Ipsy subscription, however, this month I was severely disappointed with it so I have absolutely no problems cancelling it.  

JustFab is much the same.  Each month that I forget to skip they bill me $39.99.  I am then forced to buy a pair of shoes that I do not need… and I find their quality is really lacking lately.  And to add to it all, once I pick out a pair of shoes, they then bill me for the tax and shipping, another $18!  I can buy the same shoes at Walmart for half the cost, should I need them.

We don’t watch much TV and even though Netflix is only $7.99, I feel that we are not getting $7.99 worth of use out of it.  I won’t miss Netflix.

We subscribed to Equifax’s credit monitoring as we were working on building our credit to use for our house loans (when we were planning on building a much larger home).  It was just something that we kept forgetting to cancel.  If we want to know what our credit report looks like, we can send away for our yearly free report.

I am amazed that I was spending $1250 per year on these drafty expenses.  That $1250 in savings will go a long way in paying off our debt and saving money!

I missed cancelling Netflix, Ipsy, and one Equifax in time this month, so our debt reduction won’t be as much as it should have been since these charges will be tacked on to the balance.  However, I do know they are there now and will not let them sneak away on me again!

What are some other drafty areas that you have found while budgeting?

Selling our Stuff Online

 

As part of our Total Money Makeover, we started selling our unwanted and unneeded stuff on-line through eBay and Kijiji.  Our first listings of some DVDs and CDs started a week ago and we ended last night with $24.22, selling 5 DVDs and a CD. From our profit, eBay took $3.43 and PayPal will take $2.18… So we made $18.61 from our 6 sales.  You may not think this is a lot, but I feel like it is a huge accomplishment considering those 6 discs were previously sitting on our shelves, neglected, dusty, and not earning us anything!

This $18.61 will go toward our Baby Step #1: Saving for an Emergency Fund.

We have A LOT more stuff to sell that I rounded up when I began organizing my house a couple months ago and will be listing it all in the coming weeks.  I’ll keep you posted!

How have you had success selling online?