The Walgreens Game

As you saw in my previous post about saving on baby food, I'm really getting into trying to find ways to save money and make our budget go further. I hate how much money I spend at the grocery store every week, and so I'm reading a lot of blogs and learning how to use sales, coupons, and rebates to save on our household expenses. I was very surprised that Walgreens is actually an excellent place to do this. They have weekly sales that are usually pretty good, they have store coupons in their ads that add to your savings, they have a monthly Easy Saver catalog that offers special coupons and rebates, and they also "stack" coupons, which means you can use a manufacturer's coupon on top of any store savings for the same item. So if you play your cards right, you can get some major deals at Walgreens. This feels like a game to me, like a challenge to see how good of a deal I can get there. I'm still learning how to play, but it's a lot of fun in the process!

So here is my latest attempt:I went to Walgreens today and got all this stuff, and here's the savings breakdown:

Total value of what I bought: $79.86
Store coupons and sale savings: $21.59
Manufacturer's coupon savings: $9.25
Easy Saver rebate: $10
Total savings: $40.84 (51%)
Total expense after rebate: $39.02 (49%)

So I think I did pretty good for a beginner! The trick for me now is learning how to decide when to stock up on sale items, when to only buy one or two, and when to pass up on a really good deal because we don't actually need it...