Bonus for Buying

I think we are all pretty used to pulling out our store loyalty cards by now. The grocery store, hardware store, Babies R Us, garden center, and CVS cards are all dangling off my keychain. While it irks me sometimes that you can only get sale prices if you have your card, I do appreciate getting money off at the gas pump for my grocery store purchases and $5 coupons from the hardware store when we reach a certain point level, plus extra coupons because by being on the mailing lists of all these places.

I've also found a few products that we buy regularly have their own rewards programs. One is the cat litter we buy for Mocha. Each box of Fresh Step has a code that you can enter on their website for points. There are different items you can cash in your points for, but we just get the coupon for the free box of litter. It works out to be a free box with every 10 or 11 we buy. Not a bad deal, even if it takes a little bit of time to enter the code online.

The other product is yogurt. We regularly buy a quart of Stonyfield yogurt to eat with our granola, and while Bert was eating baby food, I would often purchase baby yogurt. Any of their packages have a code on them that you enter on their website, just like the cat litter program. Again, they have a wide variety of items to choose from but we stick to things we can actually use, not gimmicky stuff that will get shoved in a drawer. We've exchanged our points for coupons for free packages of earth-friendly disposable diapers to have on hand when we travel.

While it is a bit of a hassle to log into these sites and enter the codes, it makes our money go just a little farther. Since we are pretty committed to these brands because we are consistently happy with the products, it makes sense to get a little back when we can.

PS: Nobody is paying us to say nice things about these companies. We just like their products and are happy to take advantage of scoring some free stuff when we can!