Shopping Can Be Fun AND Frugal!!

My husband was off work on Friday because he will be working this weekend. Which happens to make for a very LONG weekend. So we decided to make it a day of shopping fun.

First my husband wanted to drop off some scrap metal at the recycling yard. This is all just junk metal that would have been thrown away. He walked out of the recycling office with $77!

We headed to the mall to shop at Gap. Remember the Groupon certificate that I told you I bought last week for $25, which gave you a $50 certificate? I actually received it and wanted to do a bit of shopping in their clearance sections. I found all this which added up to $48.80:
With tax it came to $53 something but for some reason the Groupon coupon took the tax off too and the cashier said there is nothing she can do about it so I didn't have to pay a cent for tax! I really got everything above for the $25 that I paid for the certificate. Becca will wear the jeans this fall/winter and the rest of the stuff is summer wear that will be saved for next year for the kids. The jeans alone were originally priced at $34.50!

I also hit a garage sale today. I was able to get everything below (nice brand names too! Wes & Willy, Gap, Mini Boden, Lands End) for $4.25.

That $4.25 includes a small doll house that I bought for Joe and a few little toys that the kids wanted.

Hy-Vee is having an excellent cereal deal right now so I had to get in on the action. In their store ad they have a coupon for "Buy 6 General Mills Cereal get $10 off" coupon. They also have a promotion where when you buy 6 boxes of cereal you get a $6 catalina coupon from the register good for your next purchase in store (use like cash). They had several boxes on sale for 3/$8. So basically, you buy 6 cereals and end up getting them for free. It gets better! You can also use manufacture coupons on the cereal. The plain Cheerios had $1 off coupons and I had a $2 off 5 General Mills coupon so they actually paid me $5 to buy 12 boxes of cereal! (I did two separate orders of 6 cereals each to be able to get each $6 catalina coupon.)

Is it the healthiest of cereals? No. Is it cereal that we occasionally buy? Yes! I can put this away in the cupboard and we probably won't go through more than a box or two of it a week. This was free plus a $5 profit! If I lived closer to this store I would go back a few more times before the sale ended to be stocked up on cereal for such a long time. If you have a Hy-Vee near you be sure to do this deal! Even if you don't eat this type of cereal (come on, the Cheerios are at least healthy!) you could donate it to a food pantry or give it to a family going through a tough time.

Since I already subtracted the $25 I spent on the Groupon Gap coupon from last weeks budget, I only spent out of pocket today $4.25 for everything above. If you factor in the fact that Hy-Vee paid ME $5 to buy the cereal I come out +$1 for everything above. So we have $183.75 for the rest of the month. We did do other shopping though and I will add that to my budget post for tomorrow. I just wanted to show you some examples of when shopping can be both fun AND frugal! :)