School Shopping Secrets

I was recently asked what my secrets are to shopping for school for my boys and if I could share a few. Well here is my secret: SURVIVE IT! That's it! A good bottle of wine will definitely help!

It did get me thinking about my strategies and lessons learned and if I even had any! I decided I might have a few tricks up my sleeve that I could regale you all with, though I am sure that half of you are saying, "you didn't already know that??"

Kids clothes are some sort of conspiracy I am convinced! You wear them for two months before they grow out of them IF they last that long, and a pair of jeans for little legs is not that much less than what I pay for mine, though I assure you that there is about 5 times the amount of material on mine as there is on theirs!

My kids have to wear uniforms. There are several places that I have found that carry the specific colors my boys needed and I always sign up for their emails. Every one of them had a 30% family and friends sale, though it usually happened after school started, but if I you sign up for the emails, you will be sure to know when that is happening. You also will usually get coupons emailed to you from them. I am not a fan of credit cards AT ALL, but I must confess that I do have a Kohl's card. This is where I do the bulk of my shopping for clothes. With the card, you get a coupon for 15%, 20%, or 30% off every 6 weeks or so. You can only use the coupon with your card. Here is the secret, however. Take your check book along and after checking out whip that bad boy out and pay off your account. You have to do it with your checkbook though if you want to pay right there at the register. Check out your favorite store for perks of having a card, but make sure its one you don't have to carry a balance on or pay a fee for.

Perhaps one of my biggest lessons learned is one concerning those uniform pants; particularly for boys! My boys had to wear the Khaki dress pants, but those knees could only handle so many trips of crawling though the rocks of the playground and the gym floor and over cafeteria tables before they went belly up. I was buying new pants every month on average, for each boy! So I heard from someone that Lands End/Sears will replace the pants for the entire lifetime of the pant! I ordered some for each boy. I ordered during a 30% off sale and ordered enough to get free shipping. My boys went four months before little knobby knees started poking out through the reinforced patches. Sure enough, they replaced them for me free of charge, and they replaced those again 3 more times. They do know my name and we do swap weather reports every time I call, but their customer service is excellent! I am promised that they do this with all of their clothes!!

My number one secret on shopping for clothes has to be shopping at the end of the season! You can get name brand clothes for a fraction of what you would normally pay! Just make sure your not going to be moving across the country to a school where the uniform will change just enough so that you can't use all of the polo shirts you bought last year!

Then come the actual school supplies. School supplies when I was a kid was a package of crayons and some construction paper. Now, though, if your lists were anything like mine, there were the typical crayons and markers and also very specific white board pens and paper towels and enough hand sanitizer to fill a swimming pool! Here in Florida, I found out that there is a tax free weekend on all school supplies! However I researched that, and decided that the $5 I would be saving wasn't worth trying to brave the throng of other school shoppers and risk having the glue sticks run out before I got my own required 48! So I went a few weeks before.

However if you are shopping for a big item such as a computer, this weekend is totally when you want to shop for it!!

I have incredible friends who are very savvy in finding the best deals for their school supplies. I even have a friend who, when all was said and done, was paid $5 for doing all of her school shopping!! So please, if you are one of those people, we all want to hear your secrets!! Comment on this post so we all can join you in your school shopping heaven!

If you can get your school list early on, then you can be watching the circulars for the stores you usually shop at, and can snatch up the items on your lists whenever they go on sale, especially those Clorox wipes and Ziploc baggies! Find out if the store you shop at has a loyalty card. For example in Colorado you wanted to have the King Soopers (Kroger) card if you were shopping there (its free). Target now has a debit card that is linked to your checking account. You save 5% every time you use it, and you get free shipping when you order online. And clip those coupons!!

Amazon is also amazing when you get to those last few days before school and still haven't found illusive Learn-to-Letter notepads! Amazon doesn't charge tax, and if you sign up for an Amazon Prime Membership, you will get free two day shipping. You can also sign up for a trial of this if you know you are going to be buying a bunch of things and want to give it a try.  For those of you with kids in diapers, you can also save a ton on them if you have the Amazon Prime membership (and last time I checked they took coupons for those diapers)!

Backpacks are always a frustration for me. They are expensive! My plan is to always make them reuse their backpacks for a few years, but so far they haven't made them to the end of the year! If you watch Groupon, sometimes you can get good deals, but make sure they are quality backpacks and not ones where the zipper is going to fall out after a week! I tend to love Amazon for backpacks as well, but again you can't "feel" it before you buy it. Amazon, however, has reviews and I love reading what other moms have to say about the product before I incorporate it into my crazy life! Outlet stores are a great place to buy backpacks. I love shopping those outlets stores! Again sign up for the emails from the outlet stores, because you will know of sales and get coupons!

I have to admit that most of what I have learned has been through other moms who have gone before me. True some things you have to learn from experience, like the subtle noise of a diaper filling with a substance that doesn't have a chance of being contained in its thin elastic plastic, and how that noise can wake you from a dead sleep from clear across the room while your husband who is awake never even hears it, but in most "mommy moment" cases, I have learned so much from other moms! We would all love to learn from you who have more secrets so again, please comment below so we can all learn from you!
Check out this link for more tips! http://www.creditcardinsider.com/insider/top-5-ways-to-save-on-back-to-school-shopping/

HAVE ANOTHER GREAT SCHOOL YEAR!!