More scenarios for the Kroger $5 off $25 P&G promotion


The details for the Kroger P&G instant $5 off when you spend $25 on participating items promotion are posted here. This post also includes links to other participating products and coupon match-ups.

There are new loadable P&G E-saver coupons. Although they are not as good as last time, you can still get some good deals.

Here’s a scenario using manufacturer’s coupons and the new loadable E-saver coupons:

Buy 1 Crest toothpaste – $2.50
$1.50/1 E-saver loadable coupon
.75/1 from 12-28 P&G insert

Gillette Fusion manual – $7.79
$4/1 from 12-28 P&G insert

Swiffer refill – $4.39
$.50 from E-saver
$1 from home mailer

2 Old Spice red zone – $3.89
$1/2 from 12-28 P&G insert
$1/2 E-saver

1 Olay Ribbons – $3.99
$1/1 from 12-28 P&G insert
$1 Esaver

Buy 2 Daisy sour cream – 2/$4
.50/1 printable coupon here (will double if your store doubles)

Cottonelle toilet paper – $1.19
.50/1 manufacturer’s coupon from 12-14 inserts (will double if your stores double)
.50/1 loadable shortcuts.com coupon

Total before coupons = $31.64
Total after coupons = $16.39

Total after instant $5 off – $11.39

My New Years "Challenges": $40 a week grocery budget and more savings!

I thought I’d share my personal New Years “challenges” (I don’t want to use “resolution”) with you all to explain some of the changes on my blog. Feel free to participate, too, if you’d like!

My weekly posts will basically stay the same, but beginning on Sunday, I will be making these two weekly changes:

*Mondays will change from “More Savings Monday” to “Menu Planning Monday”

*Saturday will still be “Savings Saturday” but I will also post my total savings for that week

Here are my challenges for the year:

*$40 a week grocery budget (this is for a family of four) – This will include all of my groceries. I do an overall monthly budget, but rather than allotting a certain amount for the month, I am going to try to stay within the $40/week to make it easier for everyone to follow. I do my grocery shopping on Saturday, so the details from this will be posted in “Savings Saturday” but my menu for the week will be posted on Mondays.

At this point, my grocery budget does not include paper products. I don’t really budget for these things because I basically have a six month to year supply of most of these products thanks to CVS/Walgreens. Any additional paper products I do buy will most likely be covered by ECBs or RRs. It also does not include health & beauty products (I have at least a year supply of most of these and buy most of the rest using ECBs or RRs) and does not include our expenses for eating out. This comes out of a separate category in our budget.

The $40/week will be based on my out of pocket expenses. If I use gift cards, coupons, RR, or ECBs, those will not count toward the $40 weekly budget.

**I wanted to add that I see this as a possibility for me because I have a stockpile of items already to work with. If you don’t have a stockpile, it may cost you a little bit more to get started, but I will be posting items that you should stock up on while they are super cheap as they come along. Also, two of the major grocery stores around me triple coupons up to .39 and double coupons up to .50. We also don’t have any food allergies or dietary restrictions that we have to accommodate and I don’t have any babies eating baby food or formula right now.

*Meeting the following savings goals without touching our monthly paychecks

Each month, we save for some things such as auto maintenance/registration; property insurance/taxes/HOA fees (we do our own escrow after a bad experience with our escrow company a few years back); planned vacations; clothing, and long term emergency planning. If you don’t have an ING account, this is a great place to keep all of your “extra” savings accounts because you can create sub accounts and track everyone in one place.

The following savings accounts will not be funded through our monthly paychecks. I will use the “extra” things I do to fund these accounts. You can follow my savings progress through the tickers on the right side bar of the blog.

*Gift savings – This will include Christmas gifts, birthday gifts, and other gifts that we need to pay for throughout the year.

*Baby emergency fund – If you follow Dave Ramsey, you know that this is. Basically it’s $1000 that you keep on hand to cover any emergencies

*Rolling entertainment fund – We have a monthly entertainment budget, but this will cover any spur of the moment “extras” like a weekend getaway or an unplanned family excursion. It’s “rolling” because if we use the money, I’d like to rebuild it 🙂

Here are the ways that I plan to fund these savings accounts:

*Mystery shopping

*Payment from various survey companies – Mysurvey.com and Pinecone Research are my two favorites right now

*Checks from rebates (I earned about $800 last year from rebates and many of the rebates I submitted were for products I bought for “free” using ECBs or RRs)

*Garage sales – we have two community garage sales each year

*Ebay sales – every six months or so, we do a clean out of our house and items that are not being donated or sold at our garage sale get listed on Ebay

*Payment from articles that I write for Associated Content

*Money from our cash back rewards credit cards – this works well for us because we pay these cards off in full every month….I don’t recommend this route if you’re not in a position to do that

Freebie Friday: Free magazine subscription and free copy of What to Expect when You’re Expecting

Here are this week’s freebies! Enjoy!

Free copy of What to Expect when You’re Expecting
Sign up for a free nutrition e-news letter and get a free copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting!
Here’s the link: http://www.duetdha.com/just_moms/index.asp

Free magazine subscriptions
Here’s the scoop: As a marketing promotion for Subscription Rewards Newsletter, we are able to offer you a selection of magazines for FREE when you signup for our Free Newsletter. Just pick your free subscription and provide the delivery address.That’s It!

Available magazines are: Family Fun (this is a great magazine!), Computer Shopper, Latina, Weight Watchers, Entrepreneur, and Parenting (this is a 2 year subscription!)
**I signed up for this and the only personal information I had to provide was my name, address, and e-mail address
Here’s the link to sign up for your free subscription: http://www.subscription-rewards.com/index.php

Don’t forget to sign up for the free coupon books listed in this post:
http://melziemomsbargains.blogspot.com/2009/01/coupons-for-2009.html

Here’s a link to freebies from previous weeks:
http://melziemomsbargains.blogspot.com/search/label/freebies

Coupons for 2009

The coupon preview for this Sunday’s inserts is up on Taylortown. There will be FIVE inserts this week, so it will definitely be worth it to get a paper!

If your goal is to start a stockpile this year, here are some coupons that would be worth getting in multiples:

*Electrasol $2.50/1 any powerball tabs, gelpacs or quantum (expires 2-1-09) – This will be a HOT coupon. They are on price cut at Target for $3.25 right now, making it .75/box. I still have about 16 boxes of these that I got for .40/each this summer.

*Birds Eye Steamfresh Vegetable or Rice Variety, any .35 (expires 2-14-09) – if your grocery stores triple coupons, these go on sale 10/$10 every few months, which would make them free with this coupon! I have a freezer full from the last time they went on sale and I had coupons 🙂

*Jell-O Pudding Snacks or Gelatin Snacks, any .50 (expires 2-1-09)

*Kleenex Lotion Facial Tissue .40 (2-28-09) – look for 10/$10 sales making these .20/each if your stores double coupons

*Johnsons Baby Product or Johnsons Buddies Product, any except trial size $1 (expires 3-31-09) – you can get almost free Buddy bars and they are great to have on hand to stock up on other Johnsons products (baby lotion, shampoo, body wash, etc.) when the stores have Johnsons stock up sales

*Tylenol Infants, Infants Motrin or Simply Soothing, excludes trial size $2.50 on 2 (expires 3-31-09)

*Tylenol Childrens, Childrens Plus, Childrens Motrin, or Pediacare, no trial $2.50 on 2 (expires 3-31-09)

If you are getting multiples of a variety of coupons, the best deal I have found is through The Coupon Clippers. She posts the coupons for the Sunday inserts on Saturday morning. All of these will likely go fast.

PRINTABLE COUPONS
New coupons are up on Coupons.com since it’s the start of a new month. These can be printed from the Coupons.com logo at the top of the blog or from the blue sidebar on the blog. Print them fast before they’re gone!

Here are a few good ones:
*$1/1 Kraft or Polly-O string cheese

*.50/1 No Yolks noodles (if your grocery stores double, this makes for free or very cheap noodles)

*$1/2 Cheerios – use these with the CVS value packs

*$1.10/2 Old El Paso products – these can be used on ANY Old El Paso products – use these to get your taco seasoning for cheap 🙂

*.50/1 Wacky Mac pasta (if your stores double, more free or very cheap pasta!)

Smartsource.com coupons
*$1/1 Flat Earth chips – these are SO good!

*$1/1 Baked Lays (combine this with the $1/1 printable Target Frito Lay chips coupon for some cheap chips!)

*.50/1 Wacky Mac pasta

*.40/1 Idahoan potato products, 4 oz or larger (if your stores double, this will be a good deal)

*$3/2 Johnsons Red Cross First Aid products – stock up on items for your first aid kit. Trial “trial sized” first aid kits are .99 at Target, so you get $1 overage if you buy 2. They also have the gauze and first aid tape that you can get for almost nothing using this coupon.

Also check out the printable offers available from Cool Savings!

Sign up for these great (and free) coupon books:

Home Made Simple

Thrifty Thursday: My Favorite Bargains from 2008

For this week’s Thrifty Thursday, I thought I’d share a few of my favorite bargains from 2008:

Amazon toy sale – The Amazon toy sale last month was AWESOME! I saved so much money that I had a bunch of money left in my Christmas budget and I was able to buy season passes for our family to Sea World and a zoo membership and I still have money left to start out this year’s Christmas budget.

Cottonelle toilet paper – I had never used Cottonelle toilet paper before. My first trial with them was last February or so when CVS clearanced their value packs to $4.99, there were coupons, and they were still printing ECBs. Since then, I have loved the .25 and .50 coupons (which double or triple at my stores) combined with the Cellfire and Shortcuts coupons and end up getting a free (or almost free) package of toilet paper almost every time I go to the grocery store.

CVS – I can’t say enough good things about CVS. Thanks to them, I have an ample supply of health and beauty items (shampoo, deodorant, vitamins, toothpaste, toothbrushes, razors, body wash), cleaning supplies, laundry detergent, and diapers that I got for free or close to free. My total combined savings on two cards was over $10,000 this year.

Electrasol coupons – Thanks to two different $2.25 Electrasol coupons and a great price cut at Target, I stocked up on Electrasol and paid almost nothing for it. I still have several boxes left and I have given some away.

Free Scotch Brite disposable toilet scrubber coupons – In March or April, Scotch posted a PDF coupon for their disposable toilet scrubbers on their website. The expiration date was about 6 weeks out. I printed lots and lots of copies and looked for toilet scrubbers everywhere I went. I can’t remember how many I ended up with, but I still have about six boxes left.

Johnsons buddy bars – I have a huge stockpile of these, but my kids love them and I got them for FREE! I still have some of the $3 Kroger catalinas to use.

Kroger – The Mega sales they have had have been awesome. My pantry is over flowing and we’ve had to add shelves to accommodate everything. I love that they double and triple coupons because I save a ton every time I go and then get discounts on my gas on top of that.

Lila Guide Target gift cards – I earned a total of $35 in gift cards from Lila Guide this year for writing 10 reviews, starting a group, and adding members. It was a super easy way to make $35! 🙂

Omaha Steaks – Even though the promotion with the GEICO cards ended up being a bit of a fiasco, who can complain about free meat?

Target – Thanks to the $2 off Archer Farms ham coupon, I have a freezer full of ham steaks that I got for free. I have tons of the StarKist tuna pouches that were also free. I loved the Glade promotion and even though I gave away tons of candles for Christmas, I still have a box full of candles and air fresheners. I can’t forget the $3/2 Huggies coupon from December/January. I still have about 13 tubs of “free” wipes left from that deal. The $5 gift card or $5 off Pampers when you buy diapers/wipes coupons from the summer were awesome, too!

I’m looking forward to lots more great bargains in 2009!