Diaper dealing

Some have asked how exactly I do my diaper deals at CVS (or any deal for that matter), so I thought I'd give a quick example, as this week was a great diaper stocking week.

CVS is running a deal this week where if you buy $25 worth of certain baby products (of which Huggies is a part of), you get $10 Extra Care Bucks (ECB) back. ECBs are basically a coupon good for virtually anything in the store. So in this instance, if I buy $25 worth of the selected product, I get a $10 coupon/store credit back. Huggies are also on sale for $10 a pack.

Three weeks back coupons.com had $5 off coupons on Huggies diapers (sizes N-2). You could print up to two off per computer, and since I have multiple computers I can print out from between home and work, I printed out about 10 of the coupons, which were good for 30 days ($5 off coupons are pretty unheard of, so I wanted to take full use of them). And obviously with a baby soon to arrive, we can stock up on these sizes.

To do the CVS deals, you need to have a membership card, which you register for that is free (similar to a grocery store card). As a member, you often get coupons that print out at the end of your receipts, and it varies, but I seem to get a lot of coupons where if you purchase $50 worth of products, you get $10 back (commonly called 10/50 coupons).

So cutting to the chase, what I did today was went and bought 5 packs of Huggies diapers. That added up to $50. I used the 10/50 coupon to get the total to $40. I then used 5 of the $5 coupons, one for each package purchased, to get the total down to $15. I then used $10 worth of ECBs from a previous transaction to get the total down to $5, which I paid. Then, since I purchased at least $25 worth of the baby products, I got $10 ECB (so in essence replacing the $10 in ECBs I spent in the transaction). So all told, I spent $5 and got 5 packs of Huggies premium diapers (so $1 a piece!).

But I'm not done yet! Huggies participates in a program called Caregiver's Marketplace, where if you send your receipts in, you will get a check mailed to you for $.75 for each pack of Huggies purchased. So that will actually knock down the price of each of the packs of diapers to 25 cents! And obviously with the price of diapers, this is a big money saver.

Now this is an unusually good deal because of the big coupons, but on average I probably spend $3 for each pack of diapers, and no more than $5 (it's weird, but I now think paying $5 for a pack of Huggies or Pampers, widely considered the premium brand of diapers, as a little high!), when not too long ago I was paying $7+ a pack for the generic brand diapers at Wal-Mart which leaked much more frequently.

So, that in a nutshell, is how I do it. I have to give credit to my sister who got me started on these savings. In this day in age and in this economy, every little bit of savings makes a difference (and diapers is definitely a big expenditure when you have small kids!).