Stop “Clipping Coupons” and Start “Trading”
As most of my blog readers know, my wife and I just had beautiful twins on April 5th 2011. We instantly got thrown into the super refined marketing machine that is geared towards new parents. Since I already had experience with coupons I knew that I would use them for a lot of our baby purchases also to help us save money.
Over the last few months I have been able to use coupons for diapers, formula, and clothes to help us save money. The problem has always been though that you need more coupons so you can save more money.
Coupon Clipping Services
I first tried a couple of these services and they have helped me save a good amount of money, but there are limitations to how well they work. For one, there is a minimum purchase required. So even if you only need 3-4 coupons, many of them have a $5 minimum purchase.
Ebay for Coupons
This is what I used next and it has turned out to be very helpful to me espessially for our formula purchases. Similac, has $5 off coupons that can make the ready to drink Similac Advanced bottles Free in some cases. I was able to order 20 of these coupons and stock us up for 2 months. In addition to the manufacturer coupons, Similac will also send out “checks” that you can use at checkout as case. Combining the $5 coupon with the $5 check will make one of the 1.45 lb formula packs be almost 50% off.
This is all great and has helped me and my family save quite a bit of money, but you do still have to buy the checks and coupons from ebay or other services.
How to do it for Free?
My wife was browsing around on one of the baby related forums the other day and saw a post for someone that had Similac checks that they were wanting to “Trade” for Enfemil. We just happened to have a couple of checks for that brand and a couple of coupons. We arranged the swap and agreed to mail the coupons the next day. For the cost of a postage stamp, we were able to get $10 worth of saving.
I recommend that even if you know what brand of formula you are going to use (or even if you want to be sneaky and sign up even if your breastfeeding) to sign up online for all of the manufacturers. They will continue to send you coupons and checks for 12 months. You can simply use the ones for your formula brand and use the others for trading power on online forums or even sell them on ebay to help out with other cost.
