Saving Money Top Tips

Apps: Slickdeals ▪️ Rakuten ▪️ HEB ▪️ Flipp ▪️ Ibotta ▪️ Fetch ▪️ Google Opinion Rewards ▪️ Amazon Shopper Panel

Sites: Any coupon matchup sites ▪️ Kroger Gift Cards

Over the years I have signed up for every store and restaurant rewards program at places in my area.  At each of these places you get something free on your birthday or during your birthday month.  I'm just throwing the idea out there, but what if, instead of putting your actual birthday in your user profile, you put a different birthday in each rewards account?  This way, maybe you could get a free birthday treat every 3 days. Maybe you could track each free item and corresponding birthday on a spreadsheet.  Maybe everyone in the family should have their own rewards accounts.  It doesn't seem wrong to do because you are still getting your one item free a year from each restaurant.  Here are some of the ones on my list:

Ace Hardware - $5 Credit

Baskin Robins - Ice Cream

Bath Body Works - Any Item

Black Rock Coffee - Drink

Cheesecake Factory - Cheesecake

Chick-fil-A - Brownie

Common Bond - $7 Credit

Crumbl - Cookie

CVS - $3 Credit

Denny's - Grand Slam

Dominos - Cinnastix

Dutch Bros - Drink

Einstein Bros - Egg Sandwich

El Tiempo - Dessert

Grimaldi's - Pizza

Halal Guys - Meal

Hawaiian Bros - $10 Credit

IHOP - Pancakes

IKEA - $10 Credit

Jimmy John's - Sandwich

Kolache Factory - Egg Kolache

North Italia - Dessert

Nothing Bundt Cakes - Mini Bundt

Outback - Dessert

Panda Express - Meal

Panera - Pastry

Papacito's - Dessert

Potbelly - Cookie

Red Robin - Meal

Salata - $12 Credit

Saltgrass (or any Landry's restaurant) - $25 Credit

Sephora - Samples

Shake Shack - Shake

Slim Chickens - Jar Dessert

Snooze - Pancake

Sprinkles - Cupcake

Starbucks - Drink

Tarka - BOGO Entree

Texas Roadhouse - Appetizer

Toasted Yolk - Donuts

Torchy's - Half Queso on your Half Birthday

Torchy's - Queso

Ulta - Samples

Velvet Taco - Red Velvet Cake

Whataburger - Whataburger Jr.

I am constantly buying discounted gift cards for places I go to regularly. Here are the top ways to find them:

• Set an alert on Slickdeals for "storename gift card"

• The HEB app has 3-6 gift cards for 20% off every week (H&M, Gap, REI, and many more)

• Kroger gift card emails

• eGifter

• Raise and CardCash

• Mothers Day, Fathers Day, Black Friday, Christmas - most of the restaurants you go to will be offering 20% off gift cards.

Gift cards I buy every year:

• North Italia: Buy $100, get $30 during the holidays

• Postino: Buy $100, get $30 during the holidays

• Outback: Buy $50, get $20 during the holidays

• Ulta: 20% off gift cards during the holidays

• IKEA: Buy $50, get $10, usually twice a year

• Pappas Restaurant Group: Buy $100, get $20 during the holidays

• Uber and Lyft: 10-15% off multiple times throughout the year at Best Buy, PayPal, and Kroger

• Gap or Old Navy both work at Athleta, and those gift cards are always 20% off

• Target: 10% off Target Gift Cards twice a year (and then just load it to your Target account)

• Southwest: $500 for $420 at Costco or Sam's usually twice a year

I will usually buy the max amount allowed for retail gift cards (Target and IKEA usually cap at $500 per sale).  For restaurants, if there are no restrictions on the promo I will stock up for the year. North Italia will sometimes just give you an extra $30 gift card when you buy $100, so you can buy $1000 worth of gift cards (or whatever you usually spend in a year) and get another $300 in gift cards as a bonus.  But at Outback, that $20 you get when you buy a $50 gift card is not a true gift card, it is a $20 holiday promo card that needs to be used between January and March.  So I may only buy $200 and get $80 in promo money. 

The most common thing I do is stack discounted gift cards with promo codes and good deals on cash back sites like Rakuten.  Let's say you are buying a swimsuit at Athleta for $100. You would already have Gap gift cards that you bought for a 20% discount, and as we know, Gap gift cards work at Athleta.  You would wait until Rakuten had 15% or 20% cash back at Athleta, and then hopefully you can find a 10% coupon to use on the Athleta site. So that $100 swimsuit becomes:

$100-10% coupon = $90.  

But you pay that $90 with a gift card you bought for 20% off, which means you actually spent $72.

You also get 20% cash back on your $90, which means you get a check for $18 at the end of the quarter from Rakuten.

So your $100 swimsuit actually cost you $54.

I do this with basically everything I buy online. 

Sometimes there truly is no discount you can use.  Like if you saw a necklace at an independent jewelry store and it was $5,000 - the jeweler is unlikely to have a coupon or discount code, there is no cash back option, the price is the price.  There are still 2 ways you can save money:

1. Avoiding Sales Tax - when you buy that necklace in NY, and then have it shipped home (out of state) where the store does not have a presence, you are not charged sales tax.  So that may save you over $400.  

2. Open a Credit Card - If you are already spending a few thousand dollars, that may be enough to get the introductory bonus on a credit card.  So buying that necklace may get you 100,000 Amex points, or 90,000 United miles or whatever the offer is.  

If you are not brand specific, you will never have to pay for any of the following items ever again:

• Toothpaste

• Soap

• Shampoo

• Conditioner

• Body Wash

• Detergent

• Shaving Cream

• Many more toiletries

I have the CVS and Walgreens apps.  There are many websites like iheartcvs.com, iheartwags.com, hip2save.com, that are coupon matchup sites.  Every week, they tell you what combo of coupons to click in-app that stack with in-store deals to make it all absolutely free.  The cashier at my CVS knows me and if she sees I have a full basket, won't let me use self checkout because my complicated transaction will break the system.  She has to check me out at an actual register.  My goal is to never pay more than $1 out of pocket.  

For most stuff to be free you will also need the Ibotta and Fetch Apps

I usually allow myself to have 10 of each item (10 tubes of toothpaste, 10 shaving creams, etc) and then I stop looking for that item to be free until I use about half of my stockpile.  

For groceries, every Wednesday I go on the Flipp app because that is when the weekly circulars are released.  I look through my local stores to see if anything I normally buy is on sale.  When something is on sale I stockpile it.  If Ben & Jerry's is on sale for $2/pint, I am getting 10 pints. If I see butter on sale for $1.50/lb I'm getting the max amount allowed.  If chicken breasts are on sale for 89 cents/lb, I'm buying 10 pounds, marinating them, and freezing. I bake a lot, and the fruit that goes into the pies and muffins and cakes I bake that week is whatever is on sale which also generally coincides with what's in season, so win-win. 

Most credit cards have an area for Merchant Offers. I have the apps for my cards on my phone, and scroll through the offers twice a month.  Some examples of offers would be:

• 10% back at Kroger, up to $9

• Spend $125 at Molton Brown, get $25

Whenever I see a cash back deal at a grocery store, my first instinct is to go to the store and buy and Amazon gift card. Amazon gift cards almost never go on sale, so this is the workaround.  In the example above, I would go to Kroger, buy a $90 Amazon gift card, and load it to my Amazon account. You will see the $9 in credit hit your card statement in a few weeks. 

For the second example, I try to pair those deals with a cash back site.  So if Rakuten is giving me 15% cash back at Molton Brown, my $125 purchase would actually cost $81.25 as I would be getting a check from Rakuten for $18.75, and also seeing a statement credit for $25 on my credit card.  

Every year my internet provider tries to nearly double the price of my service because my promo rate has ended.  And every year I call and politely ask to cancel so that I get sent over to Customer Retention, and they extend my promo rate for another year.  However, this only works for so long, and after 5 years of getting my promo extended, this year they said I have run out of extensions and I would have to pay $90. Can I afford to pay them the extra $45 a month?  Yes.  But I don't want them to have it.  

So I did cancel my internet, and I had my "roommate" aka my brother sign up for internet and get the new customer rate.  If you have a partner or a roommate or even a trusted friend you can do the same thing.  Every year, try to extend your promo rate with Client Retention but if that doesn't work, switch off who pays for internet / electric / Sirius XM Radio / whatever.  By the next year, you will be considered a new customer again. 

I am in Costco every week just because I love going to Costco, getting my hot dog and wandering around.  I have the $120 executive membership because I usually spend more than $3,000 in a year, which pays for the basic $60 fee with the 2% cash back rebate.  This year I got a $97 rebate, which means I spent $4850.  I will probably spend $2000 of that on gift cards and cheese, and the rest is when the parents of my friends come to the US and go on sprees before they fly back home, or when I'm visiting my parents and they text me a list and that list is rarely less than $600. 

If you don't think you will spend that much to warrant the executive membership, the savings you will get on gas alone makes the basic membership worth it. If you fill up your car every other week, and Costco gas is 30 cents a gallon cheaper than other gas in my area, you are saving $10/month just on gas.  And you get access to the Chicken Bake.  Note: The 2% rebate does not include gas spending. 

I mostly buy things at Costco when they go on sale, and then I buy enough for the year.  When my giant container of All Free & Clear detergent goes down to $10, I buy 4 of them, which is actually enough for like 2 years. But for perishable items, I buy enough for a few months. Not all Costco or Sam's items at normal price are a good deal, but club items on sale blow the prices of every other store out of the water. 

My most frequent Costco food purchases:

• Food Court Hot Dog

• Boursin, Babybel, Brie, Feta - everything but the Brie will go on sale

• Antipasto 2 Pack, Lox

• Bake at Home Sourdough, Stonefire Naan

• Salad Kits, Bell Peppers

• Rotisserie Chicken

Sam's Club has a lot more snack foods than Costco, and I like their lox better, but I go infrequently.  At least once or twice a year you can get your Sam's Club membership for free so that's when I usually create an account and sign up.  I mostly buy discounted gift cards but occasionally there will be a deal on something like Cascade pods and I will stock up.

My Hulu subscription is covered by the streaming credit I get through Amex Platinum. I share this with my family and friends in exchange for most other streaming services. If I didn't have this streaming credit and I actually wanted to use Hulu, I would buy one years worth of discounted Hulu gift cards which are frequently 20% off (like I've said on this site many times, set a Slickdeals alert), and apply to my account. 

I use YouTube premium the most out of any streaming service I have access to.  I get this for free through credits I earn throughout the month by using the Google Opinion Rewards App. When I search for things or go places, Google asks me questions about it, or asks me to upload my receipts, and pays me to answer those questions.  

I also like Kindle Unlimited, which is normally $12ish per month.  Hwowever, they are constantly offering deals like 3 months for $1.  Then you cancel, wait 3 weeks, and you are eligible for that offer again.  If you don't want to play that game, but also don't want to pay full price, you can download the Amazon Shopper Panel App.  Every month I upload 10 receipts to the app, and they put $10 into my Amazon account.   

Audiobooks are the same way.  Audible emails me pretty frequently with offers - 3 months of Audible for $1 or whatever the latest and greatest is.  I get my 3 audio books, put the promo end date on subscription tracker, then cancel.  

If there is a specialty subscription I want because a new season of a show just wrapped up, I will sign up for a free trial, cancel it, and usually they offer me another month free.  Always make an effort to find the subscription you want for a discount before you pay for it. 

Also remember that you don't need every streaming service every month.  Maybe pick one or 2 streaming services per quarter and then cancel. 

The Libby App allows you to load many different library cards onto your profile.  All of your college friends live in different big cities across America.  Ask them for their library card numbers and you will rarely have a book you want be on hold.  I can now read books from my library system, plus Denver, Seattle, NYC, etc.  

As you might imagine, I get a LOT of emails because of all of the rewards accounts and alerts.  I currently have a sophisticated series of Gmail filters to manage and auto delete, but if I was starting from scratch I would just create a separate email address.  

I like Temu, and people are constantly talking badly about them.  "It's crap from China." It's exactly what is on Amazon but for a quarter of the price.  "They are draining peoples bank accounts when they pay with their debit cards." Ok so pay with a credit card and this will not happen.  "China is stealing all of our information".  We already gave away all of our information to the various social media companies, and you can shop on the website if you don't want to download the Temu app.

I fill my cart with Amazon products, and then when I am ready to check out, I pull up Temu and see if I can find the exact same products and I usually can.  My order comes within 10 days.  The items are sometimes 10% of the Amazon price.  And there is usually 18% cash back on top of that at Rakuten.  

The things I do NOT buy from Temu: charging accessories, clothing, skincare, or anything I put directly on my body.  

The things I DO buy from Temu: household and organizational goods, storage containers, office supplies, seasonal gift wrap and decorations, etc.