RICHMOND - Melissa Newby is a hunter who's motivated by the thrill of the chase -- even if the quarry is nothing more elusive than a box of Kellogg's Frosted Mini-Wheats.
Her weapons are coupons, rebate forms and her own money-saving savvy.
BOXFollowing is a list of online savings resources:
www.thegrocerygame.com -- A weekly list of the lowest-priced products at a particular store matched with manufacturers' coupons and advertised and unadvertised specials. A four-week trial is free. Membership is $10 every eight weeks for one store and $5 for each additional store.
www.shortcuts.com -- Shortcuts.com is a free electronic grocery coupon service run by America Online that links coupons to your participating grocery store savings card. Once coupons are selected from the site, they're automatically added to your registered grocery-store savings card and are redeemed automatically at checkout when the card is scanned. Free registration required.
www.retailmenot.com -- Find discount codes to enter on the checkout page of participating merchants.
www.couponcabin.com -- Printable coupons, coupon codes and more.
www.freeshipping.org -- Links to free shipping offers at major manufacturers' Web sites.
www.fatwallet.com -- Offers cash-back shopping, coupon searches and a "deal forum."
www.couponcode.com -- Online discounts from more than 1,000 stores.
www.couponmom.com -- Free coupons, free samples, grocery deals by state, coupon organizing strategies and more.
www.couponwinner.com -- Promotional codes and coupons with retailer search engine.
www.dealtaker.com -- A shopping portal with links to thousands of coupons for more than 1,500 online stores. A price search engine contains more than 15 million products, which can be matched to online stores and available coupons.
www.ebates.com -- Earn rebates through purchases at qualified stores. Free membership required.
www.coolsavings.com and http://www.coupons.com -- Printable coupons for a variety of stores. New coupons usually added the first day of each month. Must download software to print coupons.
www.gogoshopper.com -- Use the site to find coupon codes and sales from large stores and specialized merchants.
www.cellfire.com -- No printing or clipping coupons. Digital savings on groceries, shopping, restaurants and entertainment can be accessed through a PC and/or mobile phone. Save grocery coupons to your savings card to be automatically redeemed when you use your savings card at checkout. Save nongrocery coupons to your phone; show your mobile coupon to the cashier to get your discount. Site includes a list of compatible phones.
www.barterquest.com, http://www.swapace.com and http://www.u-exchange.com -- Trade a skill or item you have for a job you need done or an item you want.
www.restaurant.com -- Discounted gift certificates for restaurants.
www.consumerist.com and http://www.lifehacker.com -- Moneyand time-saving tips, with a dash of humor
Newby, a stay-at-home mom, has a knack for unearthing bargains. When she and her family -- husband Scott, son Dylan, 5, and daughter Shanna, 2 -- moved from Wisconsin to Midlothian about a year ago, she parlayed her practical expertise into a freelance column for http://www.examiner.com called "Frugal Families."
The gist of her column is reducing household expenses without sacrificing standard of living.
"It's fun to me," said Newby, 34, plucking out a recent Kroger grocery receipt to demonstrate her strategy. "Saving money is a challenge with me, just seeing how much of a deal I can find."
She starts her food-budget trimdown each week by purchasing multiple copies of Sunday's Times-Dispatch. "If there are good coupons in the Sunday paper, I'll buy five or six," Newby said. That allows her to stock up on nonperishable items her family likes -- such as the Mini-Wheats.
On a recent shopping trip, Newby bought 10 boxes of Mini-Wheats on sale for $2.50 each. She used three $1-off coupons, four 75 cents-off coupons, received $8 back from Kroger for buying 10 items and qualified for a $10 rebate from Kellogg with 10 proofs-of-purchase labels from the cereal boxes. Grand total for the 10 boxes: $1, plus 43 cents tax.
"The people at Kroger think I'm crazy," she said, laughing.
Crazy like a fox, maybe. In this economy, every dollar counts. No longer do coupons carry a stigma.
The Internet is abuzz with "secret" coupon codes, downloadable and printable coupons, merchant discounts and other money-saving tips. Enterprising eBay members even sell coupons in lots of 10 to 20 for around $1.
Consumers are loath to pay full price for anything in the digital era, particularly during a recession. According to the Promotion Marketing Association, 94 percent of Americans use coupons for food, household products and health/beauty items.
Online searches using the word "coupon" jumped 161 percent between December 2007 and December 2008, according to comScore, a consumer online-behavior tracking site.
"Coupons had never been a big factor online the way they are offline," comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni recently told the New York Times. "This is something new. It's taken pricing power away from the retailers and given it to the consumers."
Couponing and other penny-pinching sites have soared on the Internet. One of the most popular spots, TheGroceryGame.com, boasts more than 100,000 members in spite of charging a fee for sharing couponing tricks researched by its founder, Teri Gault.
The Grocery Game, founded in 1999, tracks the sales history of nearly every item in supermarkets and alerts shoppers to the lowest-priced products matched with current manufacturers' coupons, weekly specials and unadvertised bargains.
"The list helps you stock up or invest in your groceries at a good time," Gault said in a phone interview. "The stores can't possibly put all of their sale items into the circulars."
The cost of the service is $10 for a one-store list every eight weeks and $5 for each additional store list. Participating local stores include Kroger, Food Lion, Whole Foods, CVS, Walgreens and Rite Aid.
Power shopper Shelly Willis of Mechanicsville has been a Grocery Game member for about seven years. She was skeptical at first, but is so enthusiastic now that she has taught several free classes on the game in area churches.
Willis also buys multiple Sunday newspapers and collects coupons from a variety of sources. Her husband, Michael, and children Kyle, 11, and Kyra, 10, help with the clipping -- about an hourlong Sunday-afternoon chore. She files them in a massive binder designed for baseball-card collections.
She shops on double-coupon days, utilizes 10-for-$10 deals and checks her Grocery Game list for specials. "Then I grab my reusable bags and take the whole binder with me to the store," she said. "They call us the binder ladies. People have approached me and asked, 'Wat did you get down to?'" at the checkout.
Willis estimates that she saves 40 to 60 percent weekly on groceries since she joined the online game. She sticks strictly to her list. "And it helps to be as nonbrand loyal as you can," she noted.
Inevitably, Willis ends up with a larger stockpile of coupons and products than her family can use. "It's great to donate products or pass coupons on to people," she said.
Frances Nunnally of Richmond swaps coupons with former work colleagues many years after her retirement. "My co-workers and I used to bring coupons to work and we had our own little coupon exchange," she said. "I'm still in touch with former co-workers by mail. More often than not, their letters contain a batch of the coupons I like."
Willis encourages friends to send expired coupons to overseas military commissaries, which honor them up to six months past their expiration dates.
So far in 2009, The Overseas Coupon Project has collected more than $2 million in coupons. For more information on how to donate or adopt a base, visit http://www.ocpnet.org.
Contact Julie Young at (804) 649-6732 or jyoung@timesdispatch.com .
HOW YOU CAN TRIM YOUR HOUSEHOLD BUDGET
Our power-shopping resources recommend the following:
GROCERIES
Make meals ahead and freeze them.
Go vegetarian a couple of nights a week to eliminate pricey meats.
Stay on the "outside loop" at the supermarket, where produce, dairy and frozen foods tend to be, rather than the inner aisles, which usually house processed foods.
Buy in bulk if you have the storage space, but be aware that bigger isn't always better. Be wary of "value-size" packages until you check the price per unit.
Obtain a rain check for sold-out items.
Don't overlook "Catalinas," the coupons that print out with your grocery receipt. (They're named for the marketing company that created them.)
Pay attention to stores' seasonal and 12-week cycles. Most brand-name products go on sale once during a 12-week period.
Join your store's frequent-shopper program, which rewards you based on your buying patterns.
Organize coupons by date.
Stockpile from stores that double coupons.
Engage in "stacking," using a store coupon and a manufacturer's coupon for the same transaction -- a practice most stores allow.
Sign up for e-mail alerts for favorite products to get coupons and other special offers. Consider using an alternative e-mail address so your primary address doesn't get too junky.
HOUSEHOLD
• Turn off unused appliances, which continue to draw power even when shut down. Use power strips for hard-to-reach plugs or multiple devices such as a TV and its media components.
• Use a programmable thermostat to control air conditioning and heating. Close blinds to block the sun in summer and open them in winter to let the rays warm your house.
• Water in the early morning. Mid-day heat causes most of the water to evaporate. Watering too late at night doesn't give your yard enough time to dry, and can result in mold.
• If you have a small yard, consider a push mower or an electric mower, which will save money and are better for the environment.
• Examine your phone bill and see whether you are using all the minutes and extras you're paying for. Consider switching to a lower plan or ditching your plan altogether and getting a pay-as-you-go phone.
Buy clothing for next year at the end of each season. Go up a size for children's items.
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