Frantic shopping week during Catalina deal

§ January 14th, 2009 § Filed under slice of life § 1 Comment

The deal started last week and ends today, but we were busy with MIL in the hospital, so hadn’t have time to go to the store much. I was there on the first day of the sale and spent about $5 out of pocket and collected $50 worth of cash vouchers.

This kind of deal doesn’t happen too often. It’s buy $30 and get back $15 in Catalina coupons, then you can use the coupons to buy more stuffs and roll into more coupons.

A typical scenario: a box of cereal is normally $4.65, it’s on sale for $2.

You buy 7 boxes of cereals 7x $4.65 = $32.55 (over the $30 threshold for getting back $15)

Sale price is 7 x $2 =$14

minus 7 x $1 coupons

Total paid = $14- $7 (coupons) = $7, you pay $7.00 ( and $0.14 in tax) and get back $15, a net profit of $7.86.

Needless to say, I have been buying cereals to make money.

We obviously won’t need so many boxes of cereals for two person, so we gave them away, donated them to the food pantry and women shelter. We even get tax relief for doing that!

The 8-roll bounty paper towels and Tide detergent are normally $14.99, they are on sale for $10 and $11.47 each. But I am able to get them for $1.50 and $3 each with the coupons and Catalina deal. I offered them for $6 to DH’s relatives, they sold like hot cakes!

Throughout the whole week, I spent about $50 out of pocket getting goods worth about $2000. Kept some of them for own use and resold some of them to T’s relatives and friends, made a net profit of $200!

I could have done much better if I could drive to the store in the morning as the store often ran out of the money making items when T got off work.  I need to get going with the driving license and get all geared up for the next Catalina deal coming up in about 2-3 months.