30% off at Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic

Do you wish you could use those great Old Navy coupons at all the Gap brand stores? Good News! From 7/30/09 to 8/2/09 Gap brands is having there semi annual Give and Get 30% promotion. This coupon is distributed through email or if you know an employee. (I always get one in my email, I get weekly emails from ON)

Copied from Gap site: The company's semi-annual Give and Get sale, which offers discounts of 30% on all merchandise, including sale items, is kicking off on July 30th. Most coupons will be distributed via email, but you can also pick one up from a Gap employee if you know someone who works there. Employees will be getting 25 postcard coupons and 25 email coupon codes. The email codes will also be good for Gap's newest store, Altheta, which is great news for exercising moms!

In addition to the already-popular Corsica and Abbey Road lines currently available on Gap's website and in stores, shoppers can expect to see the full Dance line, which is already getting heavy buzz on the Internet.

As in the past, Give and Get shoppers are asked to specify one of several charities to receive 5% of the total order price. Since Give and Get began, Gap has contributed more than $5 million to various charities through this program alone.

More details are expected to be released about Give and Get this week.

Kelloggs Rebate

Some people have had problems printing the Kelloggs, so I have added the pdf to my site. The pdf is directly linkable here www.crazycarla.com/kelloggs.pdf

In case you do not know the Kelloggs deal, here it is.

Purchase 10 of the following:
Any Kellogg's Cereal (10 oz. or larger)
Any Keebler or Austin Product (8 oz. or larger)
Any Sunshine Product (8 oz. or larger)
Any Eggo Product (4 ct. or larger)
Any Kellogg's Nutri-Grain Cereal Bar (8 ct. or larger)
Any Kellogg's Special K Cereal Bar (8 ct. or larger)
Any Kellogg's Pop-Tarts Toaster Pastries (8 ct. or larger)
Any Kellogg's Reice Krispies Treats Squares (8 ct. or larger)
Any Kellogg's Fruit Flavored Snacks (6 ct. or larger)
Any MorningStar Farms Veggie Foods Product (5 oz. or larger)
Any 100 Calorie Right Bites (6 ct. or larger)

Right now at target you can purchase 10 Eggo bakeshop products for $15 and use 10 $1 off coupons from either coupons.com, redplum, a bricks link, or kelloggs.com After rebate you will make $5 dollars and get a $70 dell coupon code

I have done this twice, sent one to home and one to our office. 20 free eggo's $10 free dollars and $140 in dell codes! This has been a good Wednesday!

Buy expensive items online

For the past several years whenever I have to make a purchase of over one hundred dollars I check online first. You can save a ton of money by purchasing online and usually save sales tax too! The biggest problem with making big purchases online is having to delay your gratification.

Another way I save online is making the minimum purchase for Free Shipping. American Eagle has a kids clothing store online only. The stuff is way over priced but we did get a 20% off coupon and wanted our boy to have shorts like daddy. I only wanted the shorts, but was not about to pay $7 for shipping. So I ordered some clothes for me. They all came in the same box and I returned the clothes for me back to my local AE store leaving me with free shipping and the shorts I wanted. It really bug me that stores double and triple the "cost" of shipping, this is one way I fight back.

7/7/09 Right now AE is having a 70% clearance sale and free shipping for 3 or more items. If you find something you like order it and two more items, then return the other two item to your local store.

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!

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

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?"

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!

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

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.