With Black Friday advertisements coming out now, we thought we should give some advice regarding the shoppers holiday. These tips could save you time, money, and stress. At the end of the article we will also post retailers links. There you can find Black Friday advertisements as soon as they are released. We will also post links to the apps that will help you maximize your savings on Black Friday, and year round. We downloaded them to our chrome search bar. Most of these apps will display the percentage of savings on the screen for you as soon as you arrive on a retailers site. This way you can choose the savings that is right for you. We will give you easy access to those money saving links at the end of this post.
We love Black Friday. This is usually the time when we finish our Christmas shopping. We do try to take advantage of special deals year round, so that Christmas expenses don’t hit too hard all at once. We view the advertisements, review whom we have left to buy for, and compile a list. If we know we will be spending more than $50 at any retailer, we will link through our swagbucks account to purchase a gift card for that vendor. Amazon and eBay cards are usually available as well, if you are not sure of where to find a particular item. Once we select my gift cards, we choose the email option, because most (if not all) of our black Friday shopping will be done online, and we get the card much faster. This also gives us around $5.00 worth of swagbucks in our swagbucks account depending on the retailer. When compiling our list we try to include which vendors are carrying the special, what the pricing is, and whom the gift is for. This way if the item is sold out at one store, we know where to check next. Last year there was only one item we could not get on Black Friday, whereas the year before half of the items were already sold out. So this method helped a ton.
We then access the iBotta app. and clip cash back coupons for the items we plan to buy. This way if we follow through with those purchases we will get money back. We just need to scan in my receipt or link my rewards card. Most retailers start their special deals weeks before Thanksgiving now. Then once we are at the retailers site we search only for what we have on our list. Impulse buying is easy when everything is at such steep discounts, but youdon’t want to be spending the rest of the day with buyer’s remorse. Once we have found everything on my list, we will view our cart. So if we have $3.00 to go to get $10 rewards money, or to get free shipping vs the $14 on the cart summary, we will go back and buy something to make up for the difference. A candle, Christmas ornament, decorative hand towels, and picture frames make wonderful neighbor and co-worker gifts, so we will usually look for one of those items (and essentially that item saves us money).
We repeat this process for each retailer we have on our list, and by the time we are done, we don’t have to venture out into the crowded stores, our shopping is finished, and we have just one more thing to be thankful for. We can spend the rest of our holiday thinking only about the important people in our lives.
So enjoy the day, both shopping and spending much needed time with your family and/or friends!