Diapers!

Yesterday was the first day I HAD to go to the store to buy diapers. Because we were about to run out… my twins are 16 months old. I start couponing and stockpiling my diapers when I was 20 weeks pregnant with P and N. Stock piling has been awesome and a true life saver to affording my twins. But stock piling is tricky. When I say we were about to run out of diapers… we were about to run out of their size. P and N are in a size 3. We have plenty of size 4s, but I tried them on each of them… and they are way too big. So I used all my size 3 stock pile. I got down to the bottom of my pile because I kept thinking they fit in a 4 by the time we run out. I am going to start stockpiling about another two months of 3s because that's about how much longer I think they will be in them.

                Nice thing is if I overbuy I can save them for the second set! I have a few boxes of size 2s left over from the first set because I accidentally purchased too many… Like I said stockpiling is a huge money saver for twins… but buying the right amount is the tricky/hard part!

                Of course even though I HAD to buy diapers yesterday there was no way I was going to pay retail for them.

                So I started by raiding the Sunday newspaper and searching for coupons. I found the best deal to be CVS, Huggies. The Sunday paper had $2 off coupons and I found some printable $2 coupons as well. On top of that I logged on to my CVS account and saw the coupons the store coupon machine had waiting for me… one was a $10 off a $50 baby purchase. The CVS Huggies deal is if you spend $30 you earn $10 in extra bucks cash.

The diapers are $9.49 a pack. So I planned to purchased 5 packs at $9.49 and a Johnson and Johnson baby wash for $2.99 to reach my $50. I also found 5 - $2 huggies coupons (through the newspaper and printing from different online sites/computers) and $2 J&J baby wash coupon.  My total before coupons and tax… $50.44 - $10 cvs coupon - $10 in huggies coupons - $2 baby wash coupon = $28.44 out of pocket before tax and earn $10 and extra bucks to use on a 6^th pack of diapers.

So I would get 6 packs of diapers and baby wash for $28.44. Each pack has 36 diapers. 36x6 = 216 diapers for 13 cents a diaper plus a baby wash!

THIS WAS MY PLAN FOR YESTERDAY. I still plan to do this transition this week.  

Yesterday when I went to the CVS by my house they had only one pack of huggies size 3 diapers. I was a little mad at this as I was about to walk out and drive to another CVS…last minute I decided to ask if they had any diapers in the back. Unknowingly, I asked the manager. He said no but I have Pampers. I said thank you but Pampers aren’t part of the extra bucks deal. To which he said that’s no problem I can make them the deal. Well in my mind I am thinking that’s nice but I don’t have all the coupons for Pampers to work out to be the same good deal. As he shows me the Pampers I say you only have two packs of size 3  Pampers so that doesn’t work either. He said buy the two Pampers I will give you the $10 extra bucks, order you some Huggies ,and you can back get your Huggies and use the $10 extra bucks.

I said, DEAL! I quickly checked my coupons and I luckily had 2 Pampers coupons for $1.50 that I have been holding to forever since they don’t expire until 2015 (they were inside of tampon packages).

 The Pampers were on sale for $8.99. So I got two packs 8.99x2 = $17.98 (before tax) - $3 in coupons = $14.98, plus $10 extra bucks to use on the Huggie deal hopefully later this week. Treating the $10 extra bucks as cash this makes the diapers only 8 cent a diaper. I don’t double dip on my extra buck calculations… I will use on the huggies deals so it will keep that deal at 13 cents a diaper.

As I was checking out I said, thank you, I was just going to go to another CVS. He said we don’t want you to do that. If there is ever something like this again just tell us and we can make it right.

So while this was pure luck… the point is ASK, you never know what they will do for you to make it right and keep your business.

The second point is even if you have to go to the store today to buy diapers take a little time to check out the weekly sales and get a great deal!