February Rite Aid Haul : My Couponing Evaluation

I got a little lazy with the Haul photo for February because I had already stored away most of my stuff so not included is the Maxi Pads and Ragu Pasta sauce.  Either way you can see I was a little lazy that month.

So what I've started doing is evaluating the effectiveness of my own personal couponing.  The first thing I do is make a list of the items I got and actual money spent.  Then taking same list put the realistic price I would as a frugal shopper have paid for the item.  It's important to note, I'm not listing the Retail Price because that would really inflate my numbers because its not a part of my reality to ever pay Retail price.  So for this to be an accurate evaluation for me, I'm using my own personal price points.

So for all the items I bought my price point total would have been $106.50 not including sales tax. Notice, I didn't even count the Cover Girl and Revlon stuff because I would never buy it in my every day life.  

Guess the amount I acutally spent...

$ 19.96  

( this takes into account the $10 up I carried over from January and $10 Rebate I've submitted for)

and I still have $23.99 in UP Rewards to use in March

So my February couponing at Rite Aid saved me $86.54 !!!

81% savings basically I paid only 19% of the cost of my items and to be fair since I didn't account for sales tax I really should make my savings 91%.

And to put things in perspective I think about the time I spent (outside of work) to do this and how much I would need to work to pay for this stuff.

So to buy $106.50 worth of stuff and assuming you pay around 30% in taxes, you would need to Earn

$150.56 !  Assuming you make $17 an hour which most people do not you would need to work 8.86 HOURS !!!  That's over a days work!!! My savings this month saved me from working 7.2 Hours just to pay for living essentials.  Or if you were thinking of taking a second job, consider this which would be more effective working an extra 7.2 hours at a second job (consider that most second jobs don't pay well and you will have to consider commuting costs, extra food costs ) or just couponing?  That is what my favorite book this year "Miserly Moms" put into perspective for me.

And if I had done a retail price as a comparison look at the first item on my list the 10 Energy Saver Light bulbs I got had a retail price of over $7 each! That would have meant over $70 on just light bulbs alone.  And it would really have inflated my numbers and been misleading for me to effectively evaluate my couponing.