Steals & Deals 4/4/11

Monday, 4/4/11, was a decent day for steals and deals. After perusing Coupon Pro Blog for the best deal match-ups, I headed out to run errands. Eight stops later, I was back home and exhausted. I have a severe pinched nerve in my back that's really acting up, and the getting in/getting out of the car all those times definitely took it's toll. Luckily, Excedrin and Aleve were 2 of my purchases. Funny --- Excedrin was purchased at my 3rd stop, but it took me until my 7th stop to realize, "Hey smarty, maybe you should take some Excedrin to help stop your back pain." Yeah, real smooth of me. I was pleasantly surprised to find most of the items I wanted actually stocked. I picked up a rain check for what wasn't. Here's what I got:

1 roll of Mentos (the fresh maker!)
1 Complete multi-purpose contact solution
1 Crest rinse
2 Oral B Advantage toothbrushes
1 Right Guard body wash (that smells really good!)
1 18-pack (plus 2 free) Scunci elastic hair bands
1 125-count bottle of Excedrin
1 5 oz. bottle of Lindsay green olives
1 50-count bottle of Aleve
2 18-count boxes of Kotex tampons (not pictured)
2 Hershey Easter bunny candies

I paid $27.26 out of pocket total. I also received $21.46 back in coupons to use towards future purchases. According to my receipts, I saved a total of $38.03, which doesn't count the $21.46 in coupons I received for future spending. Not too shabby for a day's work.

As I was knee-deep in toothbrushes in CVS, a woman came up to me after noticing my detailed list of deals/coupons. We got to talking, and she's really quite a savvy lady. She donates a lot of her steals to charity, and adopted a 6-child family for Easter. She told me her fiance loves what she does because of the system she's worked out: all the money her receipts tell her she's saved any time she goes shopping is transferred to her savings account. It's basically money she would have spent to purchase the items anyway, so she feels it should be set aside like it had been spent. In the past 4 years (since she started doing this), she's set aside just over $10,000. While I haven't adopted this system, it's still an impressive sum to have to spend on whatever else she chooses. Kudos to her!