How We Saved Over $125 in 20 Minutes at CVS

This is the third time I’ve decided to write about my CVS shopping trips. The first time, I paid less than $3 for almost$30 worth of items. Then I paid less than $10 for over $36 worth of stuff.

This time my wife and I waited until Saturday afternoon (the sales end on Saturday) to do our CVS shopping. For the first time we had manufacturers’ coupons to help us – both from the Sunday paper and printable online coupons.

So, we went through the CVS circular and matched up all of the deals that we wanted with our coupons. Using the coupon database is a great way to do this. All you have to do is enter the product into the database and it will tell you what newspaper insert and online coupons are available for that item.

We had a bunch of Extra Care Bucks (ECBs) from previous shopping trips as well as two $4/$20 coupons. If you are not familiar with ECBs, read this article – here is an excerpt:

For those of you who don’t know what ECB’s are (I didn’t until a few weeks ago), here is a quick description. ECBs are basically store credits at CVS and are as good as cash. Each week CVS will identify certain items that, when purchased, give you a predetermined amount of ECBs. For instance, this week [this is a deal from the week this article was originally written] if you buy certain CVS brand pain relievers for $3.99, you get $3 in ECBs – they print out with your receipt.

Now that you know what ECBs are, let’s continue. We figured out that in order to maximize our savings, we had to break our shopping up into 4 orders. Here is a summary of the first order:

Gross Total – $20.26

Amount Saved – $8.72

Net Total (after savings) – $11.54

Total Coupons – $2.77

Subtotal – $8.77

Tax – $0.49

Grand Total – $9.26

The rationale for this order is as follows: CVS sent me a coupon via email for $2 off any $5 grocery (food items) purchase, and they also had a deal where you get 3 ECBs when you buy $10 of certain Mars and Wrigley items. So, we grouped these with two free Sobe drinks – Buy One Get One (BOGO) free from CVS and another BOGO free from Sobe (in this online game).

Here is the receipt:

Here is a summary of the second order:

Gross Total – $31.06

Amount Saved – $9.07

Net Total (after savings) – $21.99

Total Coupons – $12.00

Subtotal – $9.99

Tax – $1.26

Grand Total – $11.25

For our second order, we wanted to get the Net Total (amount after savings, but before coupons) to be at least $20 so we could use our $4/$20 coupon. We noticed that they ran a deal to get ECBs by purchasing at least $15 of Dove products. They also had Hefty trash bags (which we just ran out of) on sale with an ECB offer!

As you will see below, we used $2 and $1 manufacturer’s coupons, 5 ECBs and the $4/$20 coupon.

Here is the receipt:

And now a summary of our third order:

Gross Total – $37.27

Amount Saved – $7.95

Net Total (after savings) – $29.42

Total Coupons – $17.19

Subtotal – $12.23

Tax – $1.21

Grand Total – $13.44

The details of the third order will look a lot like the second one. Our main goal was to spend more than $20 so we could use our second $4/$20 coupon. This was easily accomplished as we got our Net Total to $29.42 before redeeming $13.19 in manufacturers’ coupons and our $4/$20 CVS coupon. We would have paid less but my wonderful wife thought we needed to buy two candy bars to get a deal that only required one.

Here is the receipt:

Finally, our last order (don’t worry, we went into separate lines and didn’t checkout all at once):

Gross Total – $43.56

Amount Saved – $3.60

Net Total (after savings) – $36.96

Total Coupons – $4.00

Subtotal – $35.96

Tax – $0

Grand Total – $35.96

Our last order was a little special because we used our Flexible Spending Account (FSA), instead of cash. I’ll go into more detail about FSAs in another article – just know that it is a way to pay for medical expenses with pre-tax income. Since we have a Visa card tied to that account, we decided to take advantage of it here.

Each item that we purchased on this order earned us ECBs, and was paid for via our FSA. We also used $4 in manufacturers’ coupons.

Here is the receipt:

So, in total we purchased $132.25 worth of “stuff”, saved $98.30 between deals, manufacturers’ coupons, CVS coupons, and ECBs, and paid $33.95 out of pocket.

But that’s not it! We also received 27 ECBs to use on our next trip! This means that if you deduct the ECBs, we only paid $6.95 for $132.25 worth of products!!!

Do you have any shopping tips and tricks? Is there anything I could have done better? Have questions about the coupon database?

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© 2010, Khaleef Crumbley. All rights reserved.

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Tagged as: Coupons, CVS, Deals, shopping, spending