CVS shopping for week 4/27-5/3

OK so shopping at CVS has become a HUGE BIG FUN deal for me! I have always loved couponing and finding sales/clearances and saving money to stretch our family budget. And I've heard of this "CVS thing" but never really got it until we moved here to Texas and I actually had a CVS pharmacy near me. So I did some research online (you can find some great blogs like this one http://www.moneysavingmom.com/ or message boards like this one http://www.hotcouponworld.com/ to explain the detailed how to's) and jumped in. I've been shopping there for about six weeks now and I've gotten soooo much FREE stuff! In a nutshell, I combine the weekly/monthly sales with their store rebate program ("store dollars" that print out for buying qualifying items called ECBs for use on my next shopping trip) and with newspaper and internet printed coupons. Typically I spend pennies OOP (out of pocket) each week and basically come home with bags of free stuff.

So for example here's this week's collection...

(2) All laundry detergent
(2) Palmolive dish soap

(2) Speed Stick deodorants

(1) children's bar soap

(1) man's hair color

(3) Softsoap body washes

(2) pkgs of batteries

(4) pkgs of 3m hooks

(2) pkgs postit note flags

(1)3pk sponges

(3) Reese's pnut butter cups

OK...the "how"...

I used these manufacturer coupons

1.00 all

1.25 palmolive

.99 children's bar soap

2.00 man's hair color

(2) 1.00 deodorant

3.00 post its

(4) 1.00 hooks

1.00 softsoap

The All, Palmolive and batteries were on BOGO free.

I used (2) $4/$20 (four dollars off of a twenty dollar purchase) CVS coupons and a $3/$15. And then I used previous ECBs of $10, $4.99, $8, and $10.

I paid $1.34 in cash (well actually from a CVS gift card I got for tranferring a prescription) in total from my three transactions.

And I left with $10.98, $4.99, $5.00 and $7.99 in new ECBs for next time.

So the grand total is that I spent $1.34 in cash, used $32.99 in previous ECBs, and came out with $28.96 in new ECBs. All things considered...the sale price of all the items total was $76.53 and it cost me at some rate (pocket change and ECBs not recouped) a grand total of $5.37...approximately what one bottle of the laundry detergent would have cost me at walmart!

Now, wasn't that fun??!!!

Want to see more CVS savings? Visit frugal blog that I read regularly...the Centsible Sawyer's CVS Superstars here http://thecentsiblesawyer.blogspot.com/2008/05/i-love-me-some-cvs-superstars.html

My very first post!!

Well here it is! My blog has been named and is officially up and running!

Please bare with me as I learn how to blog...boy oh boy are there some nice looking blogs out there and mine is just a shell of that so far.

Putting together a blog has been on my mind for sometime now, as a way to more easily share the goings-on of our family without it becoming an endless stream of emails.

So here we go...I can blog and you guys can come and go as you please, and hopefully enjoy what I share about the monkeys and what we are all up to.