Holiday Savings and a Philosophy Coupon Code

I just completed my holiday shopping - and I did it in about an hour online. Jealous? You should be, because I also saved money on every single one of my purchases!

I got 3% cash back from Best Buy and Crate & Barrel by going through Ebates, and I finally got to use the Crate & Barrel gift card I've been holding onto for some time. I had a brief moment of panic when I couldn't find the card in my cluttered purse. What a waste that would have been. Thankfully, I avoided that trap this time.

I also got 2.5% cash back through Urban Outfitters and got an additional 20% of my order over $100! I must confess, I was $2 short of the minimum order, but I surfed through the apartment sale and found a stuffed sock monkey for a reasonable price. This will be going to friends who just got pregnant, and although I wasn't expecting to find their gift at Urban Outfitters, I would have probably spent more on it elsewhere.

I'll be giving Amazon money to a Kindle owner, and thanks to the $75 I've racked up since September through Swagbucks, it's not really costing me anything!

In case any of you out there are planing to buy products from Philosophy this year, I stumbled upon this coupon code for 10% off now through Sunday and thought I'd pass it on: ebatesjolly10. Of course you can always get 5% cash back by signing up for Ebates!

Now all I have left is a Costco run for socks and boxer briefs, and I'm sure Santa won't forget my husband's fruit pastilles :)

School Related Wins

I've made a few frugal wins related to school so far. The main expense has been text books, and I've found that the last place you want to buy those is at the school bookstore.

I've seen some pretty great deals on used books through Amazon and Barnes & Noble online. I'm picking up a used copy of the text book for one of my classes on Amazon for 78 cents! Granted I can't take advantage of Free Super Saver Shipping when it's a used book, but with shipping at just $3.99 who cares? I'll be purchasing that baby just as soon as my Amazon Gift Card code comes through from Swagbucks - anyone know how long that usually takes?

I also snagged two books for another class from a friend who just took the class. Rather than selling them back to the bookstore for pittance, I figured he'd be happy to sell them to me. Luckily I already have the book for my third class since it's just an extension of the class I took last Spring. I will definitely not be selling that hefty paper weight back to the bookstore when I'm done with it. After checking out prices on Amazon and eBay I see I can get a lot more for it if I sell it myself.

I snagged 3 Top Flight notebooks for 50 cents apiece at Safeway last week. They're 70 pages each and should be enough for each class. The 3 subjects-in-one notebook sitting next to the smaller ones was $3.99 and only 180 pages. By taking a few seconds to compare prices I scored an extra 50 pages for $2.49 less!

I still have to write a huge check in October, but the little things can really add up too, so I'm doing my best to take a bite out of them, and to keep the spare pennies rolling in by using Fusion Cash, Swagbucks*, Bing Rewards, Inbox Dollars, Cash Crate, taking advantage of bank incentives, and selling things on eBay and Craigslist.

*I'm going to write up a review of Swagbucks soon - I can't believe how easy it was to cash out my first $5 Amazon card!

Throw me a bone!

I think I must have gone cah-razy, because I've decided to take school FULL TIME starting this fall. That's on top of my full time job, and of course being a full time wife and full time budgeting, saving, penny tracking obsessive compulsive. More on my plans to keep afloat later...

In the meantime, I've had to plug some pretty big tuition bills into my tracking ledger in October, January and April. My monthly savings goal has now been sadly changed to zero (shudder) other than maxing out my Roth IRA. Luckily there are two of us in the Pig Penny household, so it's not as if we won't be saving anything, and luckily I've been saving some bigger than usual chunks of change over the past few months.

Sadly, there are still some negative numbers showing up in the coming months. Thanks to aggressive savings I won't be actually overdrawn, but I am loathe to cut into my savings - especially since I won't be growing my savings account each month anymore.

So, I am trying to scrounge up a spare $2 thousand. Certainly easier said than done. I do have a little extra cash floating around that wasn't specifically earmarked for my savings account over the past few months. I have a $25 offer from Chase to open a savings account and keep a minimum of $300 in it. I also just opened a savings account for $1500 with Chase and earned $125 bonus for doing so, which you can do too! So, after meeting the minimums on the savings and checking accounts with my spare cash, I have about $650 left over.

I also have a $50 gift card from USBank courtesy of their START Saving offer, and $25 should transfer from my PayPal this week for some eBay sales I made.

That leaves me $1275 short of my goal. Deep breaths...

I am a little short over at Fusion Cash this month. I need a little bit extra in order to cash out at the end of the month, so if you'd like to earn me a referral reward click HERE to sign up for Fusion Cash. Verifying your e-mail will earn me $1 and completing an offer will earn me $2. I still haven't had a single one of my referrals actually cash out, which is kind of sad. Kind of nice because they earned me cash without actually gaining anything themselves, but kind of sad because Fusion Cash really does work. I have cashed out over $225 and hope to hit $250 this month.

If I manage to cash out every month for the rest of the year (which takes $25 minimum) I'll be $100 closer to my not-eating-my-savings goal. Again, feel free to throw me a bone by signing up :)

Other than that I'll be rolling counts, taking a look at what else I can Craigslist and eBay, and trying to earn Amazon gift cards over at Swagbucks to help cover my Christmas shopping. Yes, I've succumbed to Swagbucks. Earning Amazon cards through Bing's reward program proved addicting!

So feel free to throw me a referral bone to help me towards my goal, and hopefully I'll be able to pay for school without going broke!

Practically Free Jeans!

My grandmother in laws new puppy has been systematically ruining my clothing with every visit. On our first visit she chewed up my very favorite scarf. The one I got compliments on every time I wore it. The one someone brought me back from Korea as a gift.

Bad dog.

On our most recent visit I was wearing a pair of jeans that I knew I'd have to replace in the next few months. There was a worn spot that was becoming more and more of a hole, but wasn't quite there yet. One visit to grandma's and the worn spot was officially a hole. Puppy's sharp little claws and constant jumps were just too much for my poor worn jeans to bear.

Very bad dog.

The last thing I wanted to do right now was spend $200 on a new pair of jeans. Yes, I know there are jeans that aren't $200. I just haven't ever been able to find any that I would want to wear! So I headed over to eBay to peruse the Paige pages.

I found a pair of jeans with a Buy It Now price of $37.10 with free shipping. They were listed as new, but washed once. Do I care that they were washed? No! Honestly, I wouldn't have really cared if they were technically worn. The pictures showed jeans in perfect condition, and other listings like it were a lot higher.

I knew I'd have to have them hemmed. Nordstrom does this for free on jeans purchased at their store. Otherwise, they charge $14. All in all, I would have had a pair of good-as-new Paige jeans for $52.43 after tax. Pretty darn good deal, if I do say so myself!

When my jeans arrived they looked perfect. When I tried them on, I realized they were not. The zipper was broken. The pull was completely missing and the teeth were all funkified.

I really didn't want to return these jeans. Even with the cost to repair the zipper they were still a great price. I decided to take them in for hemming and repair and ask for a refund on the zipper price. It cost $16 to replace. I asked the eBay seller to refund the price plus tax to my account. I was a little nervous that she was going to demand proof of the broken zipper which I had neglected to photograph before taking into Nordstrom, but I figured I had my receipt showing I'd paid for a new zipper if it came to that.

Not only did this not end up being a problem, the seller was so apologetic for the inconvenience that she insisted on refunding me the entire price of the jeans. I spent $32.85 for hemming and the zipper, and that was that.

And that is the story of my practically free jeans! Now if I could lose just 5 pounds, I'd be the happiest frugalista on earth.

Banks Profiling Your Spending

The new regulations on banking have taken a big chunk of change out of the banks pockets. I believe better consumer protections needed to be in place, but it hasn't made my life much easier. As one of those people who doesn't overdraft, pay interest on credit card debt, or otherwise get hit by fees, I was able to profit off those who do. I've enjoyed free checking and will only have to deposit $400 into my Roth this month thanks to the $100 cash back bonus I'm getting from my 2% rewards card.

Now, it's becoming harder and harder to find free checking - especially when there's no way you're going to be able to talk someone into switching to direct deposit who hands you a handwritten paycheck every week and thinks that automated payments are for losers. Yes, seriously.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to get free checking without two direct deposits every month?!

Anyway, I stumbled across this article on CNN today about bank profiling of spending. Companies like Alite Group and Cardlytics analyze the spending on your credit or debit card and provide you with discount offers based on what you might be interested in. Much like the way companies like Ebates work, the banks take a commission when you make a purchase through these offers. The projections for the potential of these profits reach towards two billion over the next few years!

I'm more than happy to be profiled if it means that I might get an offer for something I would be buying at full price anyway. I'm sure that for some people this would mean temptation (which is really the whole point of coupons, I guess) but I usually exercise pretty good self control. However, when a deal comes up on Groupon or LivingSocial that I know I will use and would have bought anyway, buying it really saves me money. And if the banks can get back a chunk of the change they've lost, that could save me even more money if the banks loosened up a bit.

An interesting concept, and one I'm excited to see go into motion. What do you think?

Ohai There!

You thought I had died? Yeah, me too for awhile there...

I've been pretty busy. Not too busy to keep up with all my blog reading though, so I figured it was time for me to get back on the blogging horse and put my contribution to the blogosphere out there.

Like I said, I've been busy. Among the many things that have been going on is one exciting development - I'm back in school! Technically speaking I have been in school for the past year, even longer than I've been blogging. The difference is I was taking care of some reqs that didn't suck every ounce of free time out of me and it didn't seem worthy of mentioning yet.

Read: I didn't feel like mentioning it until I was actually accepted into my program. I'm a big scaredy cat like that.

But guess what? I was accepted! And it was awesome! And I had all of about one weekend between being accepted and starting class. And then the first assignment was a breeze! And then it got hard...

So during the spring I focused on school and I'm happy to say that I passed the weeder class that about half of my class was retaking for the second or even the third time and I even did it with a halfway decent grade and without my husband divorcing me. Or forgetting what I looked like.

Now, for the first time in a year, I'm actually not in school. I started this whole back to school thing last summer, so this is the first time in awhile that I haven't been smack dab in the middle of a class. It feels extremely luxurious.

I'll be back at it in the Fall taking another difficult class and hopefully passing. After these two classes are out of the way I hope to figure out how to work an actual full time schedule into my already full time schedule. I will have to broach that as 2013 2012 (clearly brain is fried) comes about, and haven't quite figured out the details yet. A lot of thinking and planning is going into it, and the hubs and I are saving up all of our pennies as much as possible in anticipation of a year when I could be working part time and for a much reduced salary.

Hopefully the payoff at the end will be worth it.

April Groceries - All About Restraint

I went through my freezer on Sunday and took a look at what I still had for dinners. Even after cleaning out the freezer in March, I had dinner on the table Sunday (delicious pork chops baked with onions and apple) and still had enough food for eleven more main courses!

So, my Monday grocery trip was all about restraint.

Safeway
Jalapeno Chips - $4.29 (for hubby's lunches)
6 Cans Tuna - $2.94 (49 cents a can!)
Organic Milk - $5.19 (still painful)
Red Leaf Lettuce - $1.49
Organic Yellow Onions - $2.99
Total - $16.90


Costco
Frozen OJ - $9.99
Grey Poupon - $6.75 (restocking)
Dubliner Cheese - $9.90
Organic Ground Beef - $12.99
6 Red Peppers - $5.9
Chicken Tenderloins - $16.38 (accidentally bought tenderloins instead of breasts!)
Bratwurst Sausages - $13.99
Total - $75.99


Then I went to Franz Bakery Outlet for sandwich bread and burger buns, only to discover they'd closed 15 minutes earlier. I swear, they changed their hours! There's no way I've been there before 6pm every other time I've shopped there. Back to Safeway I went...

Safeway
Wholewheat Buns - $2.49
Franz Bread - $4.69 (I could get two loaves for $5.29 at Franz...grrrr!)
3 Whole Garlic - $1 (forgot before)
Total - $8.18


Grand Total - $101.07


Put that together with my grocery shopping on the 1st, and my total for the month so far is $146.91. I'm trying to keep groceries as far under $250 as possible, and I think this still leaves me a lot of room. I know it's early still, but I'm very well stocked (hubby would say we have no food - not true!) and will probably buy more milk, maybe some veggies, just realized I need sour cream, and lunch meat. That can easily be accomplished below budget.

A note on juice - my husband LOVES orange juice. Loves it. He will make a can of concentrate, and go through it in two or three days. Three if I'm lucky. I'm not such a miser that I want to deny him juice, but it is expensive. I buy a six pack of concentrate at Costco every month for $9.99. It goes straight into the deep freeze without him even seeing it. If he gets a hankering for juice, he has to go out into the garage and make up a pitcher. If he's willing to go through the extra hassle over just grabbing water from the tap, well....I figure he deserves his juice then :)

He's also taken to filling an old drink bottle with juice for his work lunches. I'm fine with this, since normally he ends up buying a drink for $1.25 if he doesn't have one. If he keeps up this habit, I'll start buying 2 packs of concentrate a month.

Does anyone have any thoughts on traveling juice containers? Right now he's using an old plastic bottle, which worries me a little...