30% Cashback through Live.com!

Just letting everybody know about a pretty cool deal through Live.com! If you need to buy anything off Ebay and you have been putting it off, you might want to consider doing it now while you can get 30% off.

My son's birthday is coming up in about 2 weeks and I needed to buy some stuff for him so I finally took an advantage of it now, plus some stuff I have been wanting forever =) This is what I have bought so far:

Lego Star Wars PS3
Lego Batman PS3
New ac adapter for my laptop
Betty Crocker's 100 piece cake decorating kit (be wanting FOREVER!)
Foodsaver 2840 machine

All of this stuff was brand new and I paid 250$ for it through Paypal, BUT in 60 days I will getting back about 70$ through Live.com back to my Paypal account which makes everything I got about 180$ and that is including shipping! Not the best deal I know, but considering the PS3 games were 50$ a piece and the Foodsaver is 150$ retail, I think I did pretty good!

All you have to do is go to Live.com and type in "cheap wii" in the search box. The next page will bring up a bunch of search results, right above them you should see a banner that says something along the lines of "Buy Wii cheap! You may get 30% cashback if Paypal eligible" and it will have a Ebay web address. Click that and them just search for whatever you want to buy, but it has to be a buy it now auction to get the cashback. Click on buy it now and on the confirm page you will see a banner towards the bottom that says how much cashback you will get if you buy it. That's how you know you will get cashback, if you don't see this banner then you won't get any cashback. Buy your item and wait a few minutes and check your Ebay messages and click on the "You earned cashback" and follow the directions!

You have to click on the banner on the Live.com search page to actually get in on the cashback, if you don't do this you won't see any cashback offers.

I hope this helped somebody! Don't wait too long because the 30% cashback is a huge special, it is usually only 8%!

Frugal Friday - Cheap Grout Cleaner!

Today's Frugal Friday tip is one I just learned not too long ago. I have very expensive tile counter tops with grout between the tiles and I can't use any cleaner on the tiles. I can only use soap and water. So this leaves me with the problem of my grout getting dirty and not being able to clean it or get the stains off of it.

I was reorganizing under my bathroom sink one day and I saw a tube (ok well 45 tubes) of whitening toothpaste. The bright idea struck me to use this on my grout lines to see if it would work. So I took a tube of Colgate Whitening toothpaste and smeared it on my grout and let it sit about 20 minutes. Then I took one of my many free toothbrushes and brush my grout and then I wiped everything down with a rag and hot water and soap.

The verdict? It worked pretty good! It didn't get out some of the stains I was hoping it would, like the coffee or kool-aid stains. I'm starting to think those are going to permanent forever. Anyways, it did overall whiten my grout and made it look all pretty and clean!

This is a great way to use some of that free toothpaste and toothbrushes so many of us have!

How Do I Get So Many Coupons?

I am asked all the time how I get so many coupons that I get my deals with. I know people are curious because a lot of them would like to do the same thing so they can get lots of multiples of items like I do. So this is how it all started:

I started out my couponing by buying 3-4 copies of the Sunday paper. I would get 4 coupon inserts so I would have 4 multiple coupons of the same coupon. Once I started running into killer deals in the stores and I only had 4 coupons, I wanted to be able to get more than 4 items! I figured 4 Sunday papers were just not enough.

So then I started buying 8 Sunday papers at a time. This really helped with my coupon deals because being able to get 8 sale items versus 4 really helped me out... ( My family of 4 eats A LOT! LOL) So I did the 8 papers a week thing for a while.

Then I told my mom about couponing and finally got her interested, then she told me one day that she could get me lots of coupons. I figured she was talking about like a handful or something like that. So one Monday she brought me the coupons she was talking about and to my suprise, she had a stack of about 20 FULL coupon inserts from the previous Sunday's paper! I was like, YAY jackpot!


Every since then, every Sunday my mom scores me atleast 15 coupon inserts of SmartSource, RedPlum, and P&G... whichever inserts happen to be in the paper that weekend. So I have however many she gets me, plus the 6-8 I buy for myself. I have been cutting back on the amount I buy for myself since my mom has consistently been getting me atleast 15 inserts a week.

Next, if there is a super good coupon that I know will save me a lot of money, or if I see something in a sales ad on the first day the ad starts and I know I can get an incredible deal on it with a coupon, I will order lots of them on Ebay. For example, the 36 bags of cat food I wrote about in my last post, all of those coupons were ordered off of Ebay. The main reason for this was because those coupons came out the Sunday before I started couponing so I didn't have any. Even if my mom would have gotten me that particular insert with the cat food coupons in it, I still would have ordered more off of Ebay because it was too good of a deal to pass up.

The price you will pay for coupons on Ebay really varies, if it is a popular coupon then you can expect to pay 2$ - 10$ for a set of 20 coupons. (Note: I would never pay 10$ for the coupons but I have seen auctions this high before.) A lot of times I luck out and find the coupons I want for 1$ for the auction and 1$ for the shipping or even less than that. Example, the 40 boxes of Bagel-Fuls I got from Super S, I ordered all 40 coupons from Ebay for about 4$ shipping included, it seemed like those were not very popular coupons.

So that's it folks, that's how I get so many coupons! I know everybody doesn't have the ability to get 15 or more coupon inserts a week, but I have seen many people have lots of luck asking family and friends for theirs if they don't use them. Also, you can check your local coffee shops, a lot of people read the paper and leave it behind, coupons and all! Another thing to note, some cities have 2 for 1 Sunday papers where you can get 2 papers for the price of 1, my city doesn't do this but if yours does I would definitely snatch up 4 or so.

It seems like the rule of thumb about coupons is, you get as many newspapers as you have members of your family. If you have 4 family members, you get 4 Sunday papers. This seems to work for a lot of people. The golden rule about stockpiling food and other items is that you stockpile enough of one item to last your family 12 weeks. The reason for this is that everything goes on sale in 12 week cycles. It may not be the exact same brand or style, but you can pretty much guarantee that peanut butter will go on sale every 12 weeks, or hot dogs, or tin foil, or anything else. The whole point of the 12 week rule is to never pay full price for anything again!

So it really depends on how much food your family goes through to tell how many coupons you need to stockpile a particular item for 12 weeks. I like to go crazy and stockpile a particular item to last my family a year or more (if it doesn't expire quickly). This is just my style, I know some people don't have the space to do this. I am very lucky in the fact that I have a 3 bedroom house and my third bedroom has been turned into my huge walk-in food pantry!

I hope I explained everything you were curious about! If not, leave a comment and I will answer any other questions you may have.

Stay tuned for pictures of my stockpile coming up some time this week!