Trouble Printing Coupons?

Are you tired of the dirty looks you get from cashiers just because you are trying to use an INTERNET coupon? I can not believe some of the things I have been accused of when trying to use a coupon. I only print coupons using a laser printer. I get some of the dirtiest look because some cashier who does not even own a computer thinks I made up or copied a coupon because it is in black and white. I have been accused of coupon fraud more than once. When this happens I simply point out the coupons have different pin numbers and if they have a problem I will call corporate right there in line.

In the past few weeks I have been testing a coupon printing solution. In my case Walmart and Walgreens seem to be the biggest internet coupon complainers. I was in office max a few weeks back and they had "flyer paper" on sale buy one get two free. I had a free ten dollar off ten coupon coupon so I got all three for free! When I go to print a coupon I now think about where I am going to use this. If Walmart or Walgreens I print them on flyer paper. Coupons.com coupons prectibaly print in the same place everytime to I have been cutting each flyer into 4 pieces and taping them in place on a regualr piece of paper so there is minimal waste in this more expensive paper.

I am happy to report that this different paper is making a difference. Because the flyer paper more resembles sunday coupon paper, cashiers seem to be happier and they dont even notice that they are printed in black. If you are having trouble with "INTERNET" coupons, try printing on different paper!

Leave the kids at home...or not.

Like getting a good deal but hate spending hours at it? I like to keep thing organized. I put all my coupons in envelops at the beginning of the week, one for each store. I have a Meijers, Walmart, Walgreens, rite aid and another local grocery store. I do this so I am ready when the time presents it self. I could be driving down the road and see walmart and think yeah I have 30 minutes, I can do this! I love a good challenge. I seem to do best when time is short. When you lack extra time in the store you tend to leave only with the things you need. Most of the time when I go shopping it is for 30 items or less b/c I live very close to all the stores I previously listed. I usually visit one store a day in my regualar comming and going.

The other thing that short on time shopping has taught me is to look at dates on everything. I had been burned on gragging and going before. But, now it is like a game, I grab, spot the date and throw it in the cart. I can not beging to tell you the number of times I find a product that is set to expire within a week. This always happens with yogurt. I pick up a yogurt that is set to expire in two days, when another flavor has 20 days left.

To sum up todays tips, go quick, go often, go for long shelf lives!

OK it's here.....First to respond...

Gets the 50/100 Old navy coupon!

I also have 3 30/100 and 2 25% off 50 available.

PDF printing coupons

UPDATE: I just got back from walmart, I got 5 ice cream sandwiches for free, they are in the single serve section and they are only 1 dollar. If you print off the $1 off any blue bunny, you score free ice cream. I only did five because I didn't want to appear greedy. hehe I will however print a bunch of these and get 5 for free every time I go there! good til 10/31/09

Do you ever wish you could get around that pesky per print limit. The answer is printing PDF. If you have the ability to print to PDF you are in luck. On my computer I have Acrobat installed which allows PDF printing. I was excited to see a Blue Bunny coupon available today, however the coupons available were either for bomb pops or quarts of ice cream I was unable to print the bomb pops coupon so I went to the Blue Bunny website and signed up for their emails. Within a minute I got a welcome email and a 1 dollar off any BB item. When I clicked print it allowed me to select a printer, I choose PDF. The best part of doing this is any time for the rest of summer I can print off my PDF for more savings! The coupon does not expire until 10/31/09.

Notes on PDF printing. PDF printing will not work with coupons.com, smartsource.com or any other site that prints a pin number on the coupon. PDF printing a pin encoded coupon would be fraud and gives couponers a bad wrap. Printing a bunch of non pin coded coupons is like a license to print free money!

Here is a link to my PDF Blue Bunny $1 off any item coupon. Print it early and often!

http://www.crazycarla.com/BB.pdf

Using Log Me In

I am sure you have either heard of logmein.com or gotomypc.com I have been using Log me in free for about 6 months now and it is great. The idea behind these products is that you can access your computer from anywhere. Meaning you can go on vacation, leave your computer on and connected and access it from another computer. I use the program a little differently. I use it to access our work computers to take advantage of the 2 print limit on coupons. Say there is a deadline to print something, or a limit of one per ip address. I can log in and use on of our work computers to print more or register one more time. Recently I used two computers during the Biggest Loser Finale. They had that 5 dollar turkey coupon offer. I registered here at home but it would not let me do it again to send one to our work address, so I logged in and registered one at work! Yesturday I got two packets for turkey. This would have not been possible w/o being able to use two computers and this was possible because of logmein.com

Logmein.com has a free version, Gotomypc.com as far as I am aware does not.

We are having turkey kabobs tonight!

I am not a oracle or a wizard but I think the next reset will be on Thursday. The coupons available on ONW right now have an expiration of 7/2/09 but upon looking around I notice "item of the week" The item special pricing is valid to 6/25. Certainly they are not going to be advertising an old item of the week until 7/2. So this leads me to believe a Thursday reset is in order. Now as to the time....this is where we need the wizard. Last week the message about site updating was up for several hours before the site changed. I would assume that this will be true again this week too. All I can recommend is once you see the site changing message, turn on the Check 4 Change feature in firefox. Good Luck, If any of you missed a 25% off 50 or 30/100 I have a few saved up! Also, check back friday...I will post blog message for a 50/100 coupon, the first person to respond gets it!

Buying and Returning

Have you ever noticed the words on your receipt under an item that say "refund value". This comes in handy for those But one get something sales. For example: BOGO, Buy one get one 50% off, or buy one get one for .99 or .01 I always take a second look at these types of sales, this weekend at JC Penny white onezies were buy one get one 50% off. I needed one pack of 18 month and had that free ten dollar certificate. The packages were listed at 12.99 each. So I could have bought one, less my free 10 and paid 2.99 OOP. Or as I did bought two for $19.49 (12.99 + 6.50)

I paid a total for $19.49 for two packs less my free $10 certificate, I paid 9.75 in cash. Then once she bagged them up I took one out of the bag and said I would like to return this! She refunded me the $9.75 So I walked away with free onezies! I saved 3 dollars OOP just by taking advantage of their sale and return policy.

I do this all the time. Khols has BOGO sales all the time, recently they had BOGO on purses. Who needs two purses at the same time? A BOGO sale is basically a half off sale. I bought the purses for $40.00 total and then returned one for $20 back. The purse only cost $20!

This also works at Old Navy, say you get one of those 50/100 coupons and you do not need $100 of new threads. 50/100 is just 50% off so go buy what you need add some filler items to get your total upto $100 then return then excess items you will still be getting 50% off the items you wanted. Old Navy will not let you return items right away. So either go back in 30 minutes if at the mall or stop by in the next 30 days to return your items.

I hope this helps the next time you are confronted with "I would really like to take advantage of this sale, but do I really need two Shamwows?"

One of my readers sent me an extra 50/100 coupon they had and asked me to pass it along! First one to post a comment here will get it.

Make Some extra Cash!

This may seem crazy, wild or too time consuming but I do it often for extra cash. Cell phone provider T-mobile has pre-paid phone kits, the kit includes a phone, sim card and 10 starter minutes. On limited occasion the kit comes with a free $25 dollar refill card. So what do I do with these phones? Sell them on eBay! I just finished purchasing the samsung t429 phone. I sell the kit in one auction and the refill card in another.

Typically I purchase a phone for 40.00 + tax....they ship for free!
List the phone for .99 List the refill card for .99
This model phone sells for up to $74.00 (offer free shipping)
The refill card sells for $19-$22 (I just email the pin number)
between ebay listing, FVF,and paypal fees, I usually make about $20-50 a kit.

T-mobile allows 2 phones to be purchased per address every three months. I ship two to my house, 2 to work, 2 to my parents house. So six phones every 3 months. I also order the phones one at a time linking to the T-mobile site through Fatwallet.com. You get a $5 rebate per phone/order for linking through them. If you order 2 phone at a time you only get $5 but two order spaced just 5 minutes apart gets you $10! Fatwallet sends the rebate to your paypal account after 90 days, you do have to log in and request it.

I know this seems crazy, I would recommend starting slow, Just order 1 phone and see what happens. T-mob offers the free $25 prepaid card about every two weeks. Before purchasing a phone I check eBay to see what they are selling for. I found one today (Item number: 110402112040) that sold for $74

Good Luck

Do you need a NEW FREE Phone?

I have been with Sprint for almost ten years. I has been a mostly love relationship, I have never had any serious problems. In the past few years I have gotten a new phone every year for FREE! Phone technology changes every day and I am the kind of person that wants the newest, latest and greatest. It just so happens to be that time of year again so I thought I would write about how I get FREE phones every time. The secret is to avoid the Sprint store, Best Buy, and any other phone retailer. I do go to the sprint store to check out my eye candy, I pick out what I want, then I leave the store. I go home and call Customer Service and ask for the RETENTION department, once connected I tell them how much I LOVE SPRINT! I have never had a problem, but when a visited the AT&T store the other day I spotted a phone and they said I could have a great deal on it for switching. I then tell retentions that I so treasure our relationship I wanted to call and see if they could match the offer.

At this point if they refuse to play ball, tell them you are switching to AT&T ( this usually straightens them out, if not hang up and call back) I tell them I want the phone for free and no longer than a 1 yr contract. They usually can not give you the phone completely for free but they can give you a big fat service credit to offset the price of the phone. Once you have come to an agreement ask them to waive the shipping and activation charges. You will receive your new phone in a day or two. Once activated I take my old phone back to the sprint store and take advantage of their trade in program. They will give you between $25 and $75 for your old phone.

I do this every year for both of the phones on our account. A funny story....Last October we were in San Diego, our 1 yr old was screaming bloody murder, so we handed him a phone (palm centro) that shut him up. But, in the process he put the phone in his mouth and some how fried the phone:( When we got home, I went to the sprint store to see if they could fix it (it was only 4 months old, so still under contract) It was un fixable, so I called Retentions and told them I was not about to pay full price ($399) for a phone when I could just pay early termination (150) and go get one of these for free from ATT. He said no dont do that, he put a $100 service credit on the account and told us to go back to the Sprint store and pick up a new phone. I went back and the $399 price was knocked down to $250, we were then eligable for an instant upgrade credit(150) making the phone only $100. With the service credit free. Then the best part! I was able to turn the broken phone in for the $75 turn in credit. So the boy chewing on the phone actually made us $75 dollars!

How to do Old Navy Weelky!

Last night was great! I was fun talking with everybody, it made the time pass so much quicker. I thought I would offer a little recap of what happened. Last Sunday I disclosed that there was a ONW site that refreshed faster than the regular www.ONW site. Most thought I was crazy, and then when the media site did not work, there crazy suspicions were confirmed. Last night was different! I went to bed at 11 with the laptop only a few feet away. I was sleeping like a baby when the alarms went off at 12:57. It was the media site changing. Using the firefox addon feature of check for change, I was able to sleep easy knowing that I would wake up, if the ONW site refreshed. The media site refreshed for me 3 minutes before the www.ONW site.

If you missed out on getting a big coupon last night, it will be until the 21st for the page to reset to a new game. This does not mean the site will not do a mini reset between now and then. If you are resigned to wait until the 21st, you can do a couple of thing to get ready. Download Firefox, install add on Check4Change then on the night of the reset highlight the check back soon image and turn C4C on, turn up the volume and wait!

I will bring the chat box back on the 21st!

Firefox: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/personal.html
Check4Change: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3028
Secret ONW site: Email me at secret@crazycarla.com

Old Navy set to Reset!

Between 8 and midnight tonight! EST

It will be soon after ON refreshes their website to reflect Fathers Day sales.

Would a Live Unmoderated chat be of any interest? I can host!

Which Credit Card?

For the past 8 years I have used a Northwest Airlines Visa card. It has bee great racking up those miles! We went to Hawaii, Florida (2), Las Vegas, San Diego and New Orleans, either for free or upgraded to first class. We put everything on this card, utilities, dining, gas, groceries. The card does have a $55 annual fee for which I just call customer service and say "see how much I charged last year, do you want that to continue" To which they waive the annual fee!

However the recent NWA merger with Delta has put to these grand plans to an end. The NWA card is no more and I have just received my new flex perks card. This new flex perks card allows a 1% rebate that can be used for travel, gift cards, merchandise, or cash back. It does not allow you to turn these point into miles on the new delta for which I can use the miles for upgrades. So this break from earning miles has made me think, what is the best credit card out there? I have excellent credit (778 fico) so I should be able to get whatever card I want, even these days of thightened credit.

My search lead me tot he following cards:
Chase Freedom: No annual fee, 1% on everything, bonus 2% on your top 5 of 15 categories each month. Two hundered in rewadrs can be redemed for $250, a 50 dollar bonus!
Discover Card: No annual fee, 1% cashback, Upto 5% on rotating quartly categories. Cash back can be redemed for up to double with certain merchants. i.e. Childrens Place, American Eagle
American Express Cash:No annual fee, 1% on first $6500 in purchases then 5% back after that.

I choose to go with the Chase Freedom card b/c it comes with a $50 dollar bonus just for signing up! I can really see racking up the 3% on groceries, dining, utilities, gas. However I will use my Discover card that I already have for the rotating 5% cash back each quarter. For the rest of June 5% on dining, July-Sept 5% on gas hotels and theme parks.

Just a note: I do not recommend puting everday charges on a credit card that will not be getting paid off every month. It is silly to get the 1-3-5% back just to pay 20% in interest!

Multiple Addresses

If you are like me you have one email address for sending Grandma pictures of the little ones and another account for coupons and freebies. This not only helps keeps business and pleasure separate but keeps you from sorting through all the spam companies send out.

I thought I would take today's visit to share my email secret. Recently I purchased the domain crazycarla.com to write this blog. A dot com cost as little as $1.99 from godaddy for a year. I paid $7.49 The domain that I purchased a few years ago (my full name.com) I use one mail address for business mail and one for coupon mail. My secret is that I have made my coupon mail a "catch all address" Catch all means that any word, number in front of @myfullname.com will end up in my coupon mail address. This is great for those "1 per email address offers" Take for example the Free chocolate friday offer. I can log on and within minutes have 4 forms filled out by using the email sequence. a@myfullname.com, b@myfullname.com, c@my...ect. The beauty is later that day I get 4 emails all in my catch all email address confirming the free chocolate. I have been doing this everyweek for different people. I just sent the free chocolate to their house and they have no idea where it came from. My little blessing. Owning your own dot com is easy and relatively inexpensive. You do not have to operate a website to own a domain. You can just own the domain ofr the email! Go over to Godaddy and see if your name.com is avaliable. You could try to buy the domain yourlastlastfamily.com EX: smithfamily.com Then everyone in your family could use the domain for the email. EX: Carla@Smithfamily.com, ben@smithfamily.com Godaddy allows 100 email addresses per domain. Owning your own domain is also a good idea because no matter how many times we switch Internet Service Providers we keep our same email address.

You do not have to buy a dot com. Dot net and every other dot is avaliabe for purchase. Right now dot info is on sale for .99

Are you bank Loyal?

I Prefer to do all my banking in one location. I do have an Online bank account that I transfer excess money to, for the higher interest rate. I send out very few paper checks, mainly to avoid sketchy mail service and to avoid the possibility of a company saying they did not get my payment on time. Online banking is great you can usually schedule a bill to be paid right up to and including the due date.

Last night I received our bill for our Chase auto loan. Inside there was a solicitation to open a Chase checking account. If willing to open a Chase account I would get a $125 Bonus! The bonus would be payable after my first direct deposit into the account. Then I read the FINE print. Acct must be open 6 months or you lose the bonus, you must have 1 DD into the account a month or use the debit card 5 times a month to avoid a monthly service charge.

My solution, my employer allows me to split my paycheck in to two direct deposits. So for the next 6 months I will have $350.00 go to the new chase account and the rest to our main checking account at the other bank. The $350 is the amount of our car loan which I have set up to automatically pay on the due date each month. This all took about 20 minutes to set up but I will have a $125 bonus 10 days after next payday, this Friday!

I googled chase bank and the best offer I could find was a $100 bonus with the same conditions. I will look for a link to the same mail offer. $100 is still good for really not doing anything.

8am Really, Old Navy?

After a long night of waiting it appears Oldnavyweekly reset at 8am est this morning. Who saw that one coming? Also, the secret link, media.oldnavyweekly.com has been killed off. Maybe that is why the reset took so long, they were fixing the loophole. Anyway the "media" page used to load before the www page. Not sure if it will come back. I did notice that the coupon counter is a different color and does not always show the status of the big coupons.

To get the big ones, they both involve the fish in the lake and the fishing pole. For 75/100 put the marshmallow on the hook first then cast it by clicking the bobber when you see the fish. For 50/100 cast the empty hook when you see the fish.

I do not think they will reset the ONW during the week, mainly b/c they did not do it last week, and it is a short week. Just to be safe, incase they reset, but the mallow on the hook catch the fish, then set up the autoclicker to click on the fish every 30 sec to minute. Try it!

I do have good news for everybody! The coupons on the site today are only valid through Thursday June 11, reset back to Thursday night!

I will not stock pile the limited qty coupons b/c the only one avaliable is 20/100 which is the same as 10/50. The 10/50 has no print limit.

Old Navy Weekly Tips

Ok, I have received many requests to post tips here as opposed to other sites. So here goes!

I will edit this post as I have new tips to post.

My first tip leading up to the big reset is to use the autoclicker. You will drive yourself nuts walking back and fourth hitting that refresh button. So set up the autoclicker. Set it to single click every 30 seconds to a minute and start it up. Put the mouse over the refresh button on your browser. You will be able to see and page changes from afar without being glued to your computer chair!

Tip Two: Have your email address typed out and ready to go. Type it out and "copy" it. That way when you score the big one you can just paste, paste and create coupon. Then quickly email it to yourself. Trust it. After you email yourself the coupon your can refresh the page and score another coupon. For the second and subsequent coupons you will have to type in a DIFFERENT email address. They only allow one coupon per email address.

Tip Three: Send me an email and I will send the link for the secret site that reloads faster

Another thing: I plan on getting a surplus of coupons this week of all values at least the ones that have limited quantities. If come Thursday you were wishing you had grabbed a 30% off 50 I should have one.

Getting the deal!

Have you ever seen an ad in the paper I thought, that's a really great deal but I really don't want to get out their in traffic just to be disappointed when the store is out of them.

This has happened to me many times over the past years. I have developed a strategy that allows me to take advantage of sales, doorbusters and limitited quantity sales. Take last Thanksgiving for example. We really wanted to get a portable DVD player. Most stores release what they will have on sale black friday on their website a few day before. So a simple glance at the Target ad let me know about a killer deal on a samsung DVD palyer for under $40. But, I figured no matter how early I got their some kid would beat me to the last one.

What to do? I went to the store wednesday night and found the display of samsung dvd players, listed at $99.99. So I grabbed one, but I did not buy it! I perused the store for other deals before finding myself in the paper towel aisle. This would be perfect. I took my soon to be mine DVD player and hid it behind the bounty. I figured the last thing people are going to be breaking the door down friday for is bounty. Friday morning after waking up on my schedule, I drove over to Target walked down the main aisle. All the DVD players were gone, except for one! Behine the bounty!

Here a click...there a click

Last week on the Old Navy Weekly website the 60/100 coupon was hidden in the middle screen. You had to take the green bucket and fill the scene up with water four times and then click it. Obviously most people got "scandal!" However you may have noticed that if you kept clicking the scandal would disappear and then reappear with each following click.

This got me thinking, if I could just sit here all day clicking when they reset the site I will be sure to get one! Wouldn't it be great if there was something that you could install on your computer that would just keep clicking. A simple google search for "auto mouse clicker" yielded a product called Mofiki Autoclicker, and it was a free download. The download passed my tough virus software and adware protections.

Once installed the product can be setup to single or double click, and click in a time frame you specify. I chose every ten seconds. You also specify the number of clicks you want to do. I figured 6 clicks a minute, times 60 minutes, times 24 hours or 8640 clicks. So I just entered 10,000 in the counter. It was kind of memmorizing watching it work!

I think this auto clicker is a great idea, unfortunately I thought of it after the last reset last week. However if I had received a 60/100 last week, I would have not needed anything from ON this week at 100 off 100. hehehe

The only thing to be careful of is when you move you mouse to do something else it will still be clicking. Press the "pause" button on your keyboard.

http://www.mofiki.com/autoclicker.php

The art of stacking!

I print a lot of coupons, I mean a lot. My son loves Macaroni and cheese, but who wants to boil water, cook, and then clean up. So we love Easy Mac! If you have not noticed Smart Source has easy mac coupons for a dollar off 2 easy macs. If you have yet to discover the Giant grocery store website, they are a smart source coupon provider with the same coupons listed on the smart source website and more. The one of interest on Giant is the BOGO easy mac.

See where we are going...

At local stores around here (Meijer, Target ect...) You can use the BOGO and the 1 off 2 to get both for free!

And now for how I get so many coupons...hehehehe I use 6 computers! I have only one at home. But, at work there are lots of computers! So with my bosses blessing I move from station to station and print 12 total sets of coupons! (2 from smart source, 2 from Giant & coupons.com too) I do this once a week. The total time this takes me is about 15 minutes.

I only print on a black laser printer to minimize printing costs. I our printer manual estimates it cost 2 cents per black page.

I have over 36 easy macs in my closet now and have coupons to get 44 more. Not even my son could eat that much! Food is expensive and free is awesome. So when ever I generate a surplus of food I am happy to make a donation to local charities. You may notice in the picture my stack of BBQ sauce. Once I got to 11 of those I said "Carla not even a charity is going to want that much sause" So now I just leave the BBQ coupons on the shelve at Target!

So you don't think you have access to 6 computers? Our local library lets you print for free. Instant access to 20+ computers!

Free is good but giving away free is better!

Links: coupons.smartsource.com
http://www.giantfoodstores.com/shareddev/sharedcontent/savings/internetcoupons.cfm

Old Navy Steals...I mean Deals

Ok so I finally got the big coupon, actually 5 of them! I was wicked quick on that bird. I also seem to have had a couple minute advantage on the site refreshing.

I used two coupons the other night, and got $200 worth of clothing for $6.88!

The picture shows the bottom of on receipt but this pdf shows the full receipt! www.crazycarla.com/ON.pdf

Babies R Us Warning

We received a baby gate for a gift and it did not work out. We did not however have a receipt or gift receipt. No problem, I just thought they would give me store credit. NOPE! The gal and her manager said no receipt, no return. I was shocked by the attitude he displayed. I pointed out to him that the sign hanging on the wall states returns w/o receipts require a valid drives license. To no availe did that work. I then left, after he walked away from me first. I call corporate twice, the first time they said sorry, the second time they stood up for their manager. A few days past and I called manager mike to see what we could work out, he refused, and refused to acknowledge the policy stated on the wall and the b r us website.

A few more days passed and I received a call from corporate and the guy first appologized then reamed me a new one about there policy and said NO return.

There are lots of baby product stores in the world, and I will spend my money at them. I only write this to make you aware of the crazy folks at Babies R Us.

They did not try to claim that the gate did not come from their store as it has at least three b r us labels on it.

I want Candy...

Just got back from the grocery store and I found something exciting. In the check out aisle next to the tempting mm's were a smart source coupon dispenser for BOGO mm mars product. Tempting, I know! But wait! I have 6 free coupons at home from the relief fridays. WHAT to DO? Take 6 coupons to pair with the ones at home. What is better that BOGO...All 12 for free. Granted it would have better if I had the six free ones with me but it was a quick trip to a smaller grocery store. It was a D&W store. Hope this helps!

Yesturday I recieved my Two Oscar Meyer coupons for free beef franks. I will hold one to those babies for a BOGO dag sale sure to be comming soon, now that the snow has melted!

Updated: This is what the post card looks like in the mail. Shown with coupon.

Who is Carla?

Welcome to my crazy world! Much has been said about me in the past few weeks so I have decided to share who I "really" am. I really enjoy helping people save money. I have a lot of friends on the inside of big companies that share there trade secrets with me. It will be here on this site that I share my secrets with you. I hope you enjoy your time here on my site.