Couponing for Beginners-Volume Three (Rebates and Rewards Programs)

There are a lot of rewards programs out there. The ones that I am a part of currently are:
Kmart rewards-Coming up starting April 4th, Kmart will be having a doublers event where you can double coupons (similar to Albertsons doublers) and you have to be a member of their rewards program to be able to double the coupons. There are other benefits, but I don't shop at Kmart enough for them to really apply to me.

Safeway-obviously, a Safeway card is free and saves you a TON of money just by using the card, so I am a member of Safeway's savings program.

Albertsons- Albertson's card works just like Safeway's card, so I am definitely a member of this one, especially when it comes to doublers. This is how I get a lot of free product. Just last week Dreyer's Ice cream was on sale for buy one get two free with your Albertson's card. Normally it is $6.49 for one, but I had a coupon and a doubler, so I got $2.00 off. So I paid $4.49 for three of them. :)

Staples-Staples rewards program offers 10% back on paper purchases. This can be helpful if you buy your coupon paper there. There's nothing special about coupon paper, I just print mine on basic computer paper, I just call it that because that's pretty much all I use my computer paper for. They also recycle your ink cartridges for $3 credit per cartridge at their store. You can recycle up to 5 per month, so you can actually get your ink for free if you have friends who don't recycle their ink cartridges and want to give them to you. :)

Toys R Us/Babies R Us-Their loyalty program usually has to do with specific purchases, but sometimes if you spend a certain amount within an allotted amount of time you can get coupons in the mail or over e-mail. You also get special coupons that are not in their normal ad or online on their site.

Hot Topic-If you have a kid who shops here, you should definitely have a rewards card. Their rewards add up really fast toward a 30% off coupon, and you get rewards just for walking in the store and scanning your rewards card at their kiosk.

There are other loyalty based programs out there such as Rite Aid Single Check Rebates. Rite Aid has a program where on certain items every month, you will get money back if you purchase them. Every month they put out a circular that has all the available rebates in it. There are usually over Fifty Dollars of available rebates every month. Sometimes you can do more than one rebate on items. For instance, this month they had a rebate available on KAO products. This included Biore and John Freida products, as well as Jergens and a few other brands. I did the Biore and John Freida rebates, but you can do up to three rebates on these products. So, if I wanted to, I could do one more rebate on one of the products in the group of KAO products. :)

Hip2Save and Krazycouponlady often have rebates featured on their websites. Recently there was a Glade rebate where if you bought two Glade products, you could send in a form and get $5 back. I filled it out and will be getting $5 back in the mail. There are also products that have hang tags around their neck (shampoos, lotions, etc.) that say Try me Free ( or something similar) where you can send in the form and your receipt and get the purchase price of the item back in the form of a check. This is a cheap and easy way to save money and get items for free. Always keep your receipts, because sometimes you might find out about a rebate after you already purchased an item and you might have purchased it within the required purchase dates and not even know it. :) Rebates are the usual way to get free products by paying a little bit out of pocket and making money on it by submitting it for a big rebate.