Thursday, March 26, 2009

Some recent kid pictures




Here are some pictures I haven't shared yet. Most are from a recent trip to the zoo and the other one is from a trip to get frozen yogurt. The kids liked the yogurt so much that they kept on eating it despite the fact that they were shivering from the cold.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

My time is just too valuable for that

This is the response that I get from many people when I tell them about the bargains that I get from using coupons and shopping the sales. My thought is that by spending a little time shopping sales and using coupons I am able to spend less money and therefore have to spend less time earning money. The way I look at it the time that I spend working on this is very well spent. Take today's shopping trip for example. I stopped at Walgreen's and bought 13 cans of tomato sauce, it cost me $5.07 but I will submit for a $5 rebate and since I will take the rebate as a gift card that I can turn around and use on other good deals like this I will actually get $5.50 back. So in essence I have a net PROFIT of 43 cents. My next stop was Fry's and I did two transactions there. First transaction 2 4 packs of TP, 3 boxes of Oatmeal Squares, 1 box of granola bars, 4 cadbury cream eggs, 4 pb eggs, and 1 Vitamin water (not pictured). The balance actually came up negative 29 cents so they PAID me (they will usually not let this happen). Next transaction 4 boxes of granola bars 12 cents. So again I had a net PROFIT of 17 cents. I have more coupons and will stop by tomorrow and pick up more granolla bars. Total time at the store was under an hour (I left work at 3:30 and was at the daycare to pick up the kids by 4:45). I do spend time online looking at the sale blogs and such, but I have also gotten pretty efficient at skimming and just reading what is relevant to me.

If you added up the dollar amount of what I bought it would easily equal my hourly wage. So there you have it, my time is worth too much to not save money where I can.