“After yesterday’s announcement that Living Social would add 25 cities to its deal roster (bringing them to 52 total), it’s clear that the “group-buying” phenomenon is more than just a fad. The model is genius in its simplicity: Sites find local businesses willing to provide large discounts in return for spreading their names to new customers. Consumers log on daily, check out their hometown’s deals and either sign up or ignore the deal. But as this trend picks up steam, more and more competitors are coming on the scene. How do you know which one’s for you? Today we’ve rounded up the top 9 group-buying sites currently online, summarized how they operate and offered a quick review from our own experiences. Enjoy, and happy shopping…”

Read the article in its entirety at Coupon Sherpa

Some of you who read this blog may have already seen that I have written extensively about meal planning and grocery shopping . I have recently all but abandoned the electronic versions of my daily planning (save gcal and gmail contacts). In trying to fudge an electronic system to fit into my planning and GTD systems, I decided that it was time to go back to paper.

I am currently saving up for a Levenger Circa system. While I am doing so, I am moving my planning systems to paper; waiting for the day i can afford that punch and notebook. In the process, I found that my current grocery shopping system was starting to show its age. It worked fine, but it just wasn’t very well laid out. I also found that I didn’t like to have to flip through several pages in my book to find my current list. I am hoping that the ability to rearrange pages will make this adventure complete.

A Bit of Googling

After searching around a bit, I found that there were a good deal of pre-printed forms available for not only the circa system, but for pretty much any system out there. This helped out a great deal, as I am now able to get a head start on getting my thoughts in order. While I found a ton of shopping list templates out there, nothing really seemed to suite my needs.

I must immediately confess that I am not a designer, nor am I productivity expert. I downloaded a copy of Inkscape and did my best.

The Final Product

I didn’t say it was pretty. I will say that so far, it’s pretty functional. While I hate to call it a final product, I think it’s pretty serviceable for now. You can download the fully printable PDF here.

To use the form, all you really need to do is start planning your meals on the days on the left side of the form. I am making a huge assumption that you are at the intermediate stage in cooking your own meals and that you have looked at my previous example and are comfortable with making a sensible grocery list.

Once you have made your meal plan, simply use the list on the right side of the sheet to plan our your grocery shopping. While I have mentioned these things in my previous post, I do think a few things bear repeating:

1. Before you head out to the store, double check your pantry and make sure you don’t already have these items in stock.
2. Divide your list by department to speed up your trip.
3. Keep your eyes from wandering over the impulse buy shelves.
4. Keep in mind that many of these items can be bought orders of magnitude cheaper at bulk food stores and farmers markets.

In The End.

I hope this list works for you, and helps you save a little bit of dough on your grocery adventures. But! If you find that there is something missing, or something that might be tweaked to make this make more sense, let me know. Let’s call this list v1, and we’ll keep working on it until we get something that is as dialed in as it can be.

The idea of coupon stacking is: combining store coupons, manufacturers’ coupons, and possibly other rebates and offers to save big on weekly sales.

Stop by The Coupon Sherpa and check out their latest offering on Coupon Stacking

I seems like alot of people are finding the same thing. Rather than take the heat on a card they may not use, recipients of these unwieldy gifts are now selling them online at great discounts.

From Jeff C.:

“With Father’s Day coming up this weekend, gift card sales are booming as usual. It’s estimated that 3 in 10 shoppers will pick up gift cards for Dad, adding up to 1.2 BILLION in spending. Though they make a great last-minute gift, a staggering number of gift cards are never even used. There’s an estimated $40 BILLION in unclaimed gift cards collecting dust in US homes right this moment. What to do? Gift Card Granny, a leading resource for the buying and selling of discounted gift cards, has compiled an exhaustive list of merchants who offer cards, and provided details on just how much you can get back via each of the top online gift card resellers.

Some are offering as high as 80% of the card’s original value! Check out the full list and make sure Dad’s gifts don’t go to waste this year.”

Check Out the Gift Card Granny

Photo: rakspassion

Some Background

This is just an idea that I have been kicking around. I think it might have legs. I actually searched for two whole minutes to see if it had already been done. I found one, but it wasn’t what I really liked. Rather than bore you all with a design spec, I will tell a little story.

I’ll Tell you a Story

This evening, I was cleaning up my office, and I realized that I needed some plastic storage totes. I see them all the time in sales circulars for dirt cheap at local stores. Unfortunately, I don’t remember when I saw them last. I don’t know which store. I do know that I can find the flyers online, and go through each of them. Although it’s totally awesome to be able to get all the flyers at once, this still seems like only half a solution.

After mulling this around, I decided to go ahead just buy them at the first place I hit tomorrow, and dream up a solution in the meantime.

A Possible Solution – In English

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a website that did the following?

1. Pull all the sales flyers and circulars from the internet.
2. Index them.
3. Allow users to search those indices based on geographical location.

For instance, I need plastic containers. My profile would know where I live, and spit out a listing of all plastic containers in my area. I could also do the same search with “pork chops”, “oranges” or whatever.

That way, I could quickly find the best deal at the time on the items I am looking for. For things I buy all the time, like milk, I could set up an alert that would tell me where milk goes on sale each week.

While I am still in the “I’m thinking out loud” mode, I really think this could be done. Sadly, it would take more than just one guy (me) to do this. I could handle the coding, but not the design or the social engineering of the site. If you are interested in what I am talking about, read the next section.

A Possible Solution – In Dork

Just about everything about this site is simple. No one is going to bust a brain stem on this. There is, however, some work that would need to be done.

Without doing much homework, I am guessing that most store sites (CVS, Walgreen, and the like) do not have an RSS feed of their weekly sales. I don’t really have any interest in figuring out where the sites host their sales, then either scraping their site, or indexing their pdf (well, this might not be too bad.. yeah.. it will). Meanwhile, you would have to monitor each site for any changes in how the code their sites and where they store their info (yick!). It might be better to work out a deal with the store to get access to an RSS feed. I would imagine that the companies would be more than happy to sit down and hear out the pluses on them doing such a thing.

The other problem is that, once a deal is struck and the RSS feed is a reality, anyone else could step in and do the same thing. I also don’t know how I would feel about getting exclusive rights to an RSS feed. That just feels sleazy to me. Be that as it may, I still have bills to pay, and have to have some income coming in. On the other hand, the site could rely on ad revenue.

Anyway, I am still thinking out loud, but I would love to open a discussion on this, and possibly make it a reality with the help of one or two other people.

Let me know what you think.

Photo: ThomasExciting

This means that when it comes time for me to get gifts, people usually resort to getting me a gift card of some sort. There is nothing wrong with this, and I like getting them, but over the past few years, I have found that they are a sham. The ultimate sham.

Cards I have gotten

I have gotten cards from Amazon, Panera, Visa Gift Cards, Wal Mart, and many other cards of that sort. Although the store centric cards have not posed a problem, the Visa cards are definitely 100% sham. Store centric cards are fine if they are for a store that you usually buy from, but are a little bit harder to use for less frequent shopping trips. The issuing stores are banking on you forgetting it at home, or ultimately forgetting about it altogether.

You would think that a Visa gift card would be the most effective way to transfer money as a gift, because the recipient is not locked into a certain store. It’s just money that you can spend anywhere, right? Wrong.

Keep in mind that i am writing this based on experience with about fifteen such gift cards, and they all have some serious pitfalls.

The Rub

They Cost Money

When you buy a $25 gift card for someone, you have to pay $2.50. This may not sound like a lot of money, but it’s 10% of the face value.

They Cost Money to Upkeep

All cards have a shelf life before they start costing to upkeep. After several months (from as few as 7 to as many as 13) the cards start losing value on the first of each month. The lowest I have seen was $1.50 per month, and they go up do about $2.50 a month.

For me, I have found that I put a card in my wallet, and forgot about it. I went to spend money on the card a few months later, and found that I had lost $10 off the card! So, in the time that it was stewing in my wallet, the issuing company made $12.50 off that card. 50% of the face value!

Once a card runs below about $7, it’s useless!

So, you go out to lunch once. You pick up a cheap lunch another day. You end up with $6 left on the card. Now, the conundrum. What do you do with this money? If you try to split a bill somewhere, in most cases, it will not work. I am not sure why it doesn’t but the transaction gets denied. Without fail.

Currently, in my wallet, I have three cards, with an average of $7 on them. I should have $21 to spend, but no matter how I try to split it up, I cannot charge up to the lowest whole dollar amount on my card. Over the next few months, these cards will tank a few bucks a month until there is nothing left.

Do Everyone a Favor

Do the math. In the best case, you can end up with the following situation:

So, in the best case, you fork over 20% of the face value to the issuing company.

In my usual case:

Note that that extra seven bucks usually gets soaked in that monthly service fee. So, the issuing company made 62% on that card. When you add up all the people who get such cards, that is a great investment… For the issuing company.

So, do everyone a favor. When you find that person that you want to give a gift to. The guy who has everything. Write him a check, and keep the middle man out of the game.

I still remember getting that $5 check for my birthday when I was a kid. I would go out and buy an album or some 45′s. For my $5 gift from Auntie Lori, I got $5 worth of value.

Thinking about how the gift card system works now, If i were that same 8 year old now, I would be confused. And sad.

Do a Little Homework

Today’s tip will require you to do a little homework before your little one arrives, and it will require you to spend a little time each week keeping an eye on things, and paying it forward. Although there is a little work required, you are guaranteed to save a bundle on baby formula.

As soon as you find out that you will be expecting your bundle, sign up with EVERY baby supply vendor (it sounds so business like, I know) you can find. Tell them it’s okay for them to send you things in the mail and email. You might even want to start another email address for this, so in the coming years, if it gets killed with spam, you can drop it. For now, go sign up. Here are some examples:

• Enfamil
• Similac
• Gerber
• Luvs
• Huggies
• Pampers

Feel free to search around for any other companies offering free memberships, and join.

Make sure you do this as soon as possible. In a few weeks, you should start to be inundated with free samples and coupons. These free samples and coupons will continue to fill your mailbox for the next few months. Save each and every one of them. File them, organize them, whatever you have to do, just make sure you know where they all are.

Is Generic Formula Okay?

When baby arrives and it’s time to decide on a formula brand (this is assuming that you will be feeding formula at some point), you will be faced with the very personal choice of which brand to feed baby. While I am all for substituting generic brands for some things in my kitchen, I made the conscious decision not to buy generic baby formula. After seeing so many news stories of tainted baby formula, I thought this would probably be a wise choice. The idea of rat poison or surplus WWI ammunition in my baby’s formula was a risk I didn’t want to deal with.

A few years ago, I also made the conscious choice to refrain from shopping at a certain chain that rhymes with Ball Bart, so part of this solution relies on shopping around a little bit.

Step One – Gather your Coupons

Now that you have made a decision on which formula to feed baby, gather all the coupons you have for that brand. Whatever you do, do not throw out the other coupons. We will need those in an upcoming step.

Sort the coupons for your brand by denomination and possibly expiration date. This is the order you want to use them in.

One more thing I should mention. Without even doing the math, I decided to go with powdered formula. I knew it be would really expensive to pay someone else to process, package, and ship water. If anyone wants to see the math, we can do it, but my guess is that it’s a waste of money. Plus, you have to throw all those bottles in the trash.

Step Two – Scan Your Circulars

Since I made the choice to refrain from giving my money to the store that rhymes with Ball Bart, I started paying much closer attention to my spending and seeking out bargains. Over the years, I discovered the magic of CVS and its extra bucks system. What I learned was that every week, something that I needed on a daily basis was on special.

While I could write a whole article on taking advantage of CVS’s weekly specials (and maybe I will in the next few months) I found that not only was I saving a fortune on my regular household needs, I was racking up a significant fortune in Extra Bucks. Extra Bucks are just currency that you can use only at CVS. You gain them buy buying certain items, and sometimes, the cash register just gives them to you (my wife and I call this “jackpotting.”) You can also get random $5 off on $15 purchase bucks, too.

Without spending all day gushing about CVS, suffice it to say that we always saved our extra bucks. Then, we would sit. Sit and wait. Wait for our forumula (Enfamil) to go on sale. My gut feeling says that it went on sale once every three weeks. Then, we’d pounce. Here’s How it would go down:

Okay, we have cut fifteen bucks a can off the cost of baby formula. But wait, there’s more. This will cost a little bit of time, but it will pay back, and forward.

Step Three – Share the Wealth

Now, we can take the above ideas, and blow them through the roof. Everyone who signs up for the offers I mentioned in the beginning will receive and endless stream of coupons and samples. Once you dial in your brand, you will not have any use for the other brands’ coupons and samples. BUT! Someone else will.

If you are not familiar with Freecycle, you should head over there after you read this and get familiar. The gist is, if you have something that still has some use in it, and rather than try to make a buck off it, you would rather just give it away, you post your listing there. If you see an offering you would like, you can email that person, claim it, and go pick it up.

There is an unlimited supply of curios on freecycle, but one of the best uses for you and baby is to post your unneeded coupons and samples to the list. Since you saved all your coupons from step one, you can post them to the list. When you see your brand come up, you can claim it.

Here are some of the things I have claimed:

• Several 25.7 ounce samples of Enfamil. Each is worth $26.
• Several formula coupons, each worth between $5 and $15. In many cases, with my extra bucks, I ended up getting my baby formula for free. In retrospect, I never paid more than $12 for a $26 can of formula. In LOTS of cases, I ended up getting my can of formula for free.
• Coupons for other people who were using other brands of formula but weren’t on freecycle.

Final Words

Your freecycle group may not have a very active baby coupon trading group yet. If it isn’t very active yet, I urge you to start posting your coupons and samples now. Post a link to this article. Do whatever you need to do (tastefully) to raise interest.

Also keep in mind that many mothers out there don’t have the free time or the computer time participate in trading coupons and samples on freecycle. If you know any of these mothers, find out what kind of formula they use, and what coupons they have and help them out a little bit. I am sure they wouldn’t mind saving at least $15 a week for their babies.

One of the things that I really enjoy is a good book. I have piles of books that I have picked up at used bookstores and ordered from ebay. Now that I am tightening my belt, I thought that I might need to curb my book lust for a bit. Then, I discovered Swaptree.

The idea behind swaptree is:

• You take the books that you no longer want. I found that I had piles of books that I read once, and didn’t mind parting with.
• You enter the ISBN numbers into the website, and it catalogs all the books you have to trade.
• You make a list of books that you would like to have. In most cases, this is as simple as browsing the site and clicking “want it.”

As the days go by, swaptree will start to make associations between the books you have, and the books you want. It will even go as far as instigating three way trades. This means that:

• You have a book A, and want Book C.
• Another user has Book B, and wants Book A.
• A third user has Book C, and wants Book B.

Swaptree will then send all users a notification as to where to send their books. You can even print out a prepaid shipping form (for a few cents more) and drop your book in the mail.

Since most of the books ship media mail, it takes a week or so to get them, but it also means that you can facilitate a trade for about $1.35.

So far, I have made 16 trades, and have only been burned once. Let that be a caveat. If you get burned, there is not a whole lot you can do to make it right. You can give the user bad feedback, but that’s about the extent of it.

For the low price of entry, getting burned is not the worst thing that could happen to me.

One final note. I should have mentioned this earlier, but you can also share DVD’s and CD’s too. In fact, I have traded a book for a Gamecube game on two occasions.

So, dig through your book pile, find the stuff that you can part with, and get some new books on that shelf!

For years, I have driven past the sign for the local bulk food store. Every time I see the sign go by, I vow to stop in one day. The inception of this website was a push to get me to finally step in to my local bulk food store, The Food Dock

Bulk food stores buy staples (and an assortment of other goodies) by the truckload, and break the quantities down, and sell them in plain plastic bags. This allows them to sell staples at a much lower cost to you.

Some examples of the pricing include:

• Flour – 55 cents a pound. So, a ten pound bag is only $5.50. If you want to save even more, you can buy a 50 pound bag for $18, or 36 cents a pound. Compare this to about $7 for the same amount of flour at the grocery store.
• Spices – Spices vary, but none of them are more than $1 for a baby food jar full (about an ounce). At the grocery store, the same spices sell for anywhere between five and eight dollars.
• Baking yeast – If you decide to start baking your own bread, the first thing you should do is drop the idea of baking with packaged yeast. The cost of such yeast is about $3.05 per ounce. A full pound of baking yeast goes for $3.47 at bulk food stores.
• Baking needs – While I am not familiar with the prices of baking supplies, they offer the same discounts on anything else you would need for baking, including: corn meal, baking chocolate, baking powder and soda, etc.
• Health products – Dried fruit, Wheat germ, flax seed, and all the other health products are available for similar discounts and packaging.

Some things to remember:

• Since bulk food stores don’t have the same dollar power as bigger stores, you need to keep an the store hours and plan accordingly. They are usually open 9-5, but check beforehand to make sure.
• Before you buy a truckload of something perishable, make sure you can use it up before it goes bad. Per pound pricing is usually the same no matter what quantity you buy, and several quantities are available, so you can buy what you need, and still cash in on the savings.

If you live in my area (Ashland, OH), you can try the following places. Otherwise, check your phone book for more info, then go out and explore!

• The Food Dock 479 Township Road 1275 Ashland, OH 44805 419-281-3084.
• The Hayesville Corn Crib – 4 E Main St Hayesville, OH 44838 (419) 368-7500.
  The Corn Crib also sells lunch meat and cheese at great prices.

If you decide to go adventuring into the world of bulk food stores, let me know..