Becoming a boss coupon-er - Free teal and purple pens at Rite Aid!

Have you ever watched those coupon shows where the people walk out with a shopping cart full of stuff for like $5? It's crazy, but it's real. After a long while of speculation, I am now a believer in the power of coupons and I want to tell everyone about them lol.

To get this Rite Aid deal I:

• Bought 3 HI C 10 count drinks on sale for 3/$4.98
• Used three $0.55 off coupons from coupons.com here (2 printed from my ipad app and 1 from my pc)
• Used $3.00 off Load2Card coupon which I pre loaded on the Wellness+ site
• Final price $0.33 for all, $0.11 each
• If you notice the little hand in the picture you can tell that my baby fully approves lol.
• Bought four Ink Joy 8 count pens on sale for $0.99
• Used four $1.00 off Inkjoy coupons from the SmartSource insert in 8/17's paper
• The whole dollar came off of my total so I earned a penny from each purchase, which took $0.04 off my total. 
• I also got back $1 in Up Rewards which I can use on my next Rite Aid purchase so technically I made $0.71. So stoked. 

I absolutely love the colors in the colored Inkjoy set. It includes teal, purple, pink, green, blue, orange, red and black pens. They make doodling, brainstorming and writing notes even more fun. Makes me want to pick up my Gelly Roll Pen habit again lol. 

How do you get so many coupons? 

This can be the tricky part. I recently signed up for a Sunday paper subscription deal in my area where you can get a year's worth of Sunday papers for only $20. I bought 5 subscriptions which comes out to $0.38 for each paper, but I get back way more than that. Some people are more ambitious about scouting out free coupon sources such as hotels and churches or wherever else but this works well for me. I also get extra RedPlum inserts from the Midweek magazine that comes to my mailbox.

If you're not ready to fully invest in coupon-ing just yet I suggest going to coupons.com first and printing out your coupons from there. You won't be able to get all of the deals this way but it is more than enough to see if you can commit to coupons as you can get quite a few deals there. Each device or computer is limited to 2 print outs but you can even download the coupons.com App to print from a tablet or even smartphone! Most stores limit to 4 like coupons per shopping trip so if you have more coupons than that it helps to have someone else to shop with.

Want to know where to go to find these deals?

Krazy Coupon Lady is a great source to discover coupon deals and to learn more about the coupon rules for each store. I also follow Frugal Living NW since I live in the Pacific Northwest, this is where I signed up for my paper deal through the free coupon-ing class they offer. I also like Passion for Savings because they seem to have unique coupon combos which have helped me discover deals that I didn't notice on other sites, and the blog is cute :P.

Any drawbacks to coupon-ing? 

Finding the right deal combos, preparing the coupons and going to the store within the sale's time frame can take awhile at first but I've found myself getting quicker at the whole process lately. I have a coupon binder system now which helps a lot.

At first it felt kind of weird getting free items at the store, almost like stealing :P. Now I look at it as though I am getting paid for the time I spend researching coupon deals. Most clerks are very nice and knowledgeable when it comes to redeeming coupons, at least in my area.

Anyone else a coupon-er?

<3 KM