Posts Tagged ‘coupon’

Cheap Bastard Thinking in Action!

March 9th, 2008

I just wanted to share the highlights of my weekend to illustrate (a) just how cheap of a bastard I am, and (b) how the cheap bastard mode of thinking can help enrich your life.

Friday night, we loaded up the kids and took a trip to Sears. We had read on SlickDeals that Sears was having a huge clearance sale on clothing, and since we needed clothes for the twins we decided to check it out. When we got there we found several racks of clearance baby clothes that were half off the marked clearance price, which in many cases was already 50-75% off the original price. We ended up with two large bags full of baby clothes for just over $100, some items as low of $0.39 each. How did we pay? With a $100 Lands End gift card (Sears accepts Lands End gift cards because they own Lands End and sell their clothing in Sears locations) that we got by redeeming 9,000 of the 15,000 bonus Thank You points for applying for the Citi Professional card. Not too shabby!

Saturday afternoon we took a trip to Home Depot to get a couple of things for a project here at the house and decided to get the grill I’ve been wanting for the last two years. I decided on the Weber Spirit E-310 LP gas grill, which was $399.00. We bought that along with a propane tank and the supplies for our other project, and used the 10% off Lowes Moving coupon to take off a total of about $45 off our purchase. We paid with a $500 gift card that we got as a promotional bonus for opening an AMEX Business Gold card on which the annual fee was waived for the first year.

So you can see this weekend we got about $300 worth of clothing for our kids and a new $400 grill for daddy, all for nothing but our time in applying for a couple of credit cards and fulfilling the simple terms of two promotional offers. And this doesn’t include the $50 or so we still have on that Home Depot gift card and the $60 Target card from the other part of the Citi promotion. And don’t forget about the 30+ boxes of cereal I have stacked in my pantry now from the Safeway cereal sale.

So who says the frugal cheap bastard lifestyle isn’t worthwhile?

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Posted in Deals, Gift Cards, frugality

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$400 in bonuses for opening Chase checking accounts until 3/15/2008! (YMMV)

February 28th, 2008

I posted several months ago about a $200 bonus offer for opening a Chase business checking account. Well, the offer is back again, with the only change being a minimum deposit of $500 instead of $100. The offer is valid until March 15, 2008, and you can download your coupon at:

http://www.chase.com/ccp/index.jsp?pg_name=ccpmapp/smallbusiness/shared/page/business_checking_offer3

To make the deal juicer, while you are there you can open a free personal checking account with $100 minimum and direct deposit for a $125.00 bonus. The coupon for the $125.00 bonus can be found in the new mover/change of address packet at the post office.

But wait – there’s more! The word is that there are $50 business referral coupons out there that can be combined with the business checking offer. Some are also reporting that they have been offered a $50 bonus for opening a business savings account, but it seems this was a targeted promotion, so YMMV on that one.

Additionally, there are $25 referral coupons for the personal checking account. Add together all the referral coupons and account opening bonuses and you can get $400 (maybe $450) for opening a few bank accounts.

If you need referral coupons, I would suggest posting in the relevant threads on SlickDeals and FatWallet. I believe the referrer gets a bonus if the coupon is used, so there is incentive for people to share the coupons.

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Posted in Banking, Deals

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Easy 10% Savings at Lowes or Home Depot

February 19th, 2008

Have a big project around the house? You can easily save 10% on your entire purchase at Lowes by requesting a new mover coupon at LowesMoving.com. In most cases they will email you a printable one-time use coupon good for 10% off your total purchase.

But wait – there’s more! Home Depot’s policy is that they will match any competitor’s price, and most stores extend that policy to accept competitors’ coupons as well. Just print out your Lowes coupon and present it at checkout at Home Depot for 10% off your order. You’ll often find cashiers aren’t aware of the policy, however if you ask for a manager they will usually allow the discount.

Remember that while the coupon is one-time use, there is no way for Home Depot to know if you’ve used the coupon already at Lowes and can’t track whether you’ve used a particular Lowes coupon in their stores. However, use some discretion when redeeming the coupon at Home Depot. If you show up several times in one day trying to redeem the same printable coupon, you’ll most likely get shut down (rightfully so!). So just make your list and try and get everything you need in one transaction.

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Posted in Deals

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Started out 2008 with $127.94 in “Frugal Funds”!

January 2nd, 2008

Inspired by this site chronicling and totaling the amount of money found on the ground, I am starting a tally of my own. Starting at this point, I am keeping a running total of what I will call “Frugal Funds”. I include in FFs money that I get mainly because I am cheap. Included in this would be promotional bonuses for opening credit cards or bank accounts, money I find on the ground, and those special deals where you get paid to take something, just to name a few.

We will start off with a few rebate checks I had waiting for me in the mail from Christmas break. In November CVS had a couple of deals where they had the Contour and Breeze2 blood glucose monitors on sale at various price points $30 and below. They also put out a coupon for $50 off these monitors making them free in-store. And the icing on the cake was a manufacturers rebate on each for the price paid up to $40 or $50. There was no limit on the number of rebates you could claim. I sent in all of the rebates, blacking out the receipt totals and coupons redeemed, and I received back 5 of the rebates over the break for the pre-coupon amount. So after 4 checks for $30 and 1 check for $9.99, less a total of $2.05 for the stamps…

$127.94 – 2008 YTD Frugal Funds total

Not a bad way to start the year!

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Posted in CVS, Deals, Frugal Funds, Rebates

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Brother-in-law a CVS virgin no more!

November 17th, 2007

My middle brother-in-law has had his first CVS coupon experience! I’ve been a big fan of CVS deals for a while, as I first indicated on this post in April. Tonight I was able to show brother-in-law #2 the ropes and he did reasonably well for a rookie.

The deal involves a coupon for the Ascensia Contour blood glucose monitor. The coupon is for $50, however the monitor is on sale this week for $9.99. This creates a $40 overage if the cashier processes the coupon for the full amount (most do), meaning you can essentially get $40 worth of free stuff with the coupon. I’ve been taking advantage of this all week to stock up on diapers and wipes, and have had only two instances out of eight where the cashier adjusted the coupon amount.  Usually the biggest challenge is just finding the monitor in stock. It remains to be seen what the price of the monitors will be after this week, but as long as it is under $50 the deal works to some extent.

As an added bonus, the monitor has a rebate of $50 or price paid (whichever is lower), meaning that if you submit the rebate you also get $10 back by rebate. There is a thread about this on SlickDeals here, however discussion has been minimal for whatever reason.

The coupon can be found in the CVS Diabetes Book, which is often available at the pharmacy counter. There is also a printable coupon in the SlickDeals thread.  For your other CVS adventures, there is a master thread of printable coupons at SlickDeals here.

My brother-in-law’s first run resulted in success and he got away with the monitor and $51 worth of stuff for $8 using the $50 monitor coupon and a $3 off $15 purchase coupon. More coaching will be needed to get the total next time under $1.

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Posted in CVS, Deals

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