Hubby needed some hanging file folders and manila folders and wondered if I had any coupons from Staples to make them any cheaper. HA! Of course I did! Can I simply walk into Staples and buy a couple things we need though? Absolutely NOT! I can over-complicate a Staples run like the best of them! 🙂
1 case of paper, 4 half cases of paper, a box of hanging folders, 2 boxes of manila folders, 4 binders, 2 packages of paper towels, and $400 in prepaid Visas later…
While this might look strange to most people, this is quite normal in our household. We cashed out $55 in rewards and $127 in gift cards that we’d gotten free from a credit card offer. After cashing out the gift cards and getting all the rebates back, we PROFIT $1.16. The rewards and gift cards were also free money, but that over-complicates things to a whole other level. No thank you. I’ll stick with my $1.16 profit and call it good. Yes, we MADE money buying things we needed by stacking in some things we didn’t need.
PAPER
Finding an “outlet” for all the paper I buy has been quite the game changer around here. For the longest time I didn’t feel I could do any of the paper deals. I just had visions of walls of paper caving in around us because we couldn’t give away the paper quick enough. Everyone I know already has more paper than they’ll ever need! I needed another outlet for large quantities of paper, so I put out a plea to a local online group I belong to. I got a lot of responses, as you’d expect, but one really jumped out at me. A lady responded saying she worked with a local non-profit for children. Any paper they couldn’t use, she could then pass along to other local non-profits. If there still was an abundance of paper, she would then shuffle it out to local schools. Basically, she was telling me she would take as much paper as I could send her way, and she would find a home for it. PERFECT!!!
This has been absolutely the best arrangement I could have found. Now I can buy all the paper I want to cash out my rewards or gift cards. I come home and send an email off to my contact and she usually shows up in less than an hour to pick up all the paper. Doesn’t matter how crappy the weather might be – if I have the paper, she’ll come by to get it. She seems to enjoy shuffling the paper off to places that could use it. I absolutely enjoy the paper not being MY problem after I get home. 🙂
Win-win all around as far as I’m concerned. 🙂