When I was raising my family I was lucky enough to be a stay at home mom. I made it my job to be a very smart consumer and to make the most of my husbands income. I shopped the ads, I knew the ins and outs of coupons, and I always shopped for the best price. I was successful at it and it netted our family many blessings. We were never without a savings, we always had a fully stocked pantry and freezer, we ate well, and we never felt like we went without anything. It was a habit of frugality that I practiced for many, many years,
In recent years as our income increased and we have had less mouths to feed I have lost a bit of my frugal habits. I have continued to shop the ads and compare prices for the most part but using coupons became more and more rare.
My recently retired husband has become very helpful and an inspiration in reversing the "kicking of the old habit" of getting the most for our families dollar. We are now clipping, filing, and using coupons together. We are shopping the ads and taking advantage of all of the money saving games and gimmicks that the retailers offer.
I think you will find our recent savings quite inspirational yourself. The Frugal Shopper's Stars were perfectly aligned for us today and this is our money saving tale: Within the last couple of weeks my husband needed two prescriptions refilled. We had them transferred with a simple phone call to a local grocery store who was running a coupon for a $30 store credit for every transferred prescription. These two transactions, which we had to do anyway netted us $60 in grocery store credit. My husband had used prescription promotions from the drug companies to get deep discounts on the prescriptions too. One of them was free and they still gave us the $30 credit!
Today being the first Wednesday of the month the store was offering a 10% discount to senior shoppers. You only have to be 55 to be a senior. We (my husband 55, and I a non qualifying senior at just 54) searched the ads for great prices on the things we use. We pulled and used the coupons we had for the sale items we wanted to purchase.
Our total purchase was valued at $122.58. After shopping the ads and getting our 10% discount it brought the price down to $52.28. A really great value for the items we had purchased. We used the store credit we had been given from transferring our prescriptions. We are still left with a store credit balance of over $7. The real kicker is that they filled our basket (which had not cost us any money) and then the cashier totaled up our doubled coupon savings with tax and she gave it to us in cash! Bottom line.....we netted a big cart of groceries and they gave us $6.20 for shopping today! So, don't be fooled... some old habits are not always bad ones".
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