‘CVSing’

Is there are CVS in your area?  If so, you must start shop­ping there if you’re not already!  Con­ve­niently, CVS is the closet store to our house.  So, with moti­va­tion from other savvy saving/frugal blog­gers, I decided to try my coupon­ing hand at CVS. 
The best thing about CVS is their Extra Care Bucks (ECBs) reward sys­tem.  If you’re not famil­iar, ECBs are essen­tially reward money that you get to spend at CVS.  Each week in the ad there are cer­tain prod­ucts that will yield you ECBs.  What many peo­ple (and now I) do is pay “x” amount of dol­lars up front (called a primer trip) and then get “x” amount back in ECBs.  Then, you attempt to “roll” your ECBs, mean­ing that for sub­se­quent CVS pur­chases, you use your ECBs to pur­chase other items that will yield you more ECBs.  By doing this cor­rectly (it does involved a fair amount of math), you could poten­tially not ever spend a dime again at CVS. 
{Pause…at this point, if you are unfa­mil­iar with CVS or have no idea what I’m talk­ing about, here are two good ref­er­ences both called, “CVS 101″.  For the long ver­sion, click here and for the con­densed ver­sion click here.}

I did my first primer trip in August and through some seri­ous good luck, man­aged to only spend $8.26 out of pocket for every­thing pic­tured above!  Here’s how:
We got a coupon in the mail from CVS the other day for a $25 gift card when you fill a new or trans­ferred pre­scrip­tion.  So, we trans­ferred the lit­tle guy’s Zan­tac pre­scrip­tion over and got a $25 gift card! When drop­ping off the pre­scrip­tion, we scanned our CVS card at their lit­tle coupon print­ing machine (always do this!) and got a coupon for a $5 off a $15 pur­chase.  Sweet!  
So, I did this in two trans­ac­tions: 
In the first, I pur­chased the razor and the blink eye drops.  I had coupons for each and used my $5 off coupon. I paid with the gift card and that trans­ac­tion alone gave me $12.99 in ECBs.
Then, I pur­chased every­thing else in the sec­ond trans­ac­tion.  I used the $12.99 in ECBs that I just got.  Plus, 75 cents — $1 off coupons for every sin­gle item.  I used up the rest of the gift card and owed $8.26 out of pocket.  That’s the price of just one of the Cov­er­Girl lip sticks!  
All that stuff would have been a great deal any­way.  But, what makes it crazy good is that I got another $20 in ECBs to use again. My goal has been to see how far I can make that $8.26 go!
Since that ini­tial primer trip, I’ve been back two more times.  My sec­ond trip looked like this:

For that trip, I spent noth­ing!  I used my $20 ECBs & manufacturer’s coupons and didn’t even spend one penny!  Plus, I got back another $18.97 in ECBs.
Then, the fol­low­ing week I rolled those ECBs (com­bined with coupons) and I got this:

Sadly, I did have to pay out of pocket for this trip…a whop­ping $1.53!  Now I have $17.80 in ECBs, plus another $25 gift card!! That should make for some GOOD shop­ping!
To help you in your CVS endeav­ors, moneysavingmom.com and iheartcvs.com are really  good sites for plan­ning.