Just call me Ms. Cheap

For those of you who do not live in the area, "Ms. Cheap" writes a bi-weekly column in the Life section of our newspaper sharing local freebies and other tips to save money. She even has a contest every year to proclaim the cheapest of cheapos. Now some of the people that enter this annual contest are pretty extreme in their cheapness and I would never come close to comparison, but I love a good deal just as much as the next gal. (The person who won first prize this year got the flowers for her wedding by collecting live flowers that were thrown out by a local funeral home the day before her wedding. That is just a little too morbid for me.)

Here is the tale of my most recent cheap adventure. We started our shopping trip at Off Broadway (an awesome shoe warehouse) where I had $175 in gift certificates from last Christmas that I still had not used (who wants to buy shoes when they are pregnant?). Anyway, I also had a 20% off one item coupon from my handy Citipass book. All in all, I got 5 pairs of shoes with my gift certificates + $15. Three of the pair of shoes were summer shoes that had been marked down. The other two pairs were full price, but I used the coupon on one pair to save an additional $12.

While I was shoe shopping, Will strolled the kiddos down to Auntie Annie's for a buy-one-get-one free pretzel snack. In the meantime, I stopped at the Disney store where I bought several items for Claire when we go to Disneyworld in a few weeks. That will definitely cut down on our spending while we are at Disneyworld (I hope). They had t-shirts for $5 and stuffed animals 2/$20, which is a steal compared to the prices of similar items at Disneyworld. We finished off our visit with a stop at the Gap Outlet where I got Claire a pair of jeans and David a pair of pajamas (on sale for $8.99) with a $25 gift card I had. We grabbed lunch on the way home at McDonald's with buy-one-get-one free sandwich coupons that we got out of the newspaper a couple of weeks ago.

Sorry to bore you with my shopping saga, but I get pumped up about a great day of savings. I won't bore you further with photos of my loot. Stay cheap!