Most stores start their new sales on Sundays, hence I often spend Sunday mornings heading out and getting the deals. I really enjoy doing it, but feel guilty sometimes for not attending religious services more often. But look at what I got today for $28! I didn’t do as well as last time, if you go on a % basis, but still got lots of stuff for little money.

The above photo is my CVS haul.

8 boxes of oatmeal, 20 quarts of Gatorade, 4 packs of razors and 8 soyjoy bars. The soyjoy bars are horrid, but they enabled me to gain $2 ECB on each card.

The above photo is my Kmart haul.

44 items total

$103.95 before coupons

$33 after coupons and a $5 oyno

Good news, bad news with the superdoubles. Yes, Pike Creek is doing it, no hassles and they took my IPs without so much as a blink. They also took a $2 Viva catalina that I had from Acme. The bad news is that they have fixed their registers to no longer give overage. I had many items–Pert, Gillette, Dove, Glade–that were either $3.19, $3.50 or $3.79 and I had $2 coupons. Last time it did double to $4 and I got whatever the overage was. They have fixed that, so while I still got them for free, no overage. Which I had kinda planned on to help cover the cost of my other items, though I don’t think anything I got was over $0.29 after double coupons. My final total came to $33 and I got a $5 oyno, so $28 balance.

Staying organized–last night I went through my coupons which are sorted by category, and put all the $1.50 and $2 ones near the front of the stacks. Then as I got to each aisle, like “hair,” I just pulled out my stack and compared what I had to what the sales were. I also had an idea of what good, high value coupons I had because I had just looked at them last night. With both CVS and Kmart, I was only gone from the house 90 minutes and I had Kevin with me.

My savings goal for 2006-2007 was to try to keep the same ECBs rolling. Done. I’m actually still rolling those 2006 ECBs. Then last August my goal was to not pay for diapers for a year. Done. My new goal–not to pay for diapers at all for baby #2. So far I have about a 6 month supply for him, if I’ve guessed at his growth rate correctly. But I’m going to continue to take advantage of diaper deals and stock up in hopes of never paying for diapers for him.

In an earlier post, I told you about how CVS was going crazy last year with giving away ECBs with glucometers. It was during that time that I got another extra care card in my husband’s name, so that I could get more monitors and therefore, more ECBs. It was confusing at times, maintaining two cards and two sets of ECBs, but it was really worth it for the diaper deals. Most of the diaper deals are limit one, so I would do one on each card.

Somehow through carelessness and just being too busy, I’ve let that card get down to $4 ecb. So I think I’m going to retire it for now. The deals just haven’t been that great lately to warrant trying to juggle two cards. If some “can’t miss this” deals come along, I can always use it. My other card has about $40 to go with it, which is appx the amount I like to maintain.

Instead, I think for the first time, I’m going to submit some Walgreen’s rebates and get a Walgreen’s gift card. GCs do not expire, so it will be easier to maintain than ECBs. Also, Wags has been offering some decent deals, freebies and moneymakers lately, so I’d like to start taking advantage of them. I did the Dimetapp deal over the weekend and used that $10 RR to buy Halloween candy, so that’s one rebate I can submit. I still have $10 RR left–I think I’m going to go get more Ragu, then use those rolled RR to get a L’oreal something for a rebate.

So I’ll still post CVS deals, but you’ll probably be seeing more Walgreen’s deals here too.