Unexpected Savings = Photo Album!

Posted by Ethne~

You know when you check out at the grocery store and a bunch of strips of coupons or ads pop out of the machine along with your receipt?  Well, according to Extreme Couponing, those are called ‘catalinas’.  I think that’s the dumbest, least-indicative-of-what-it-is name.  If only Lori and I ran the world…

But I take a look through my catalinas anyway, and sometimes you get good stuff, like $5 off your next purchase at Cub, or $2 of your purchase of 3 greeting cards.  Lately I’ve been getting $1 off coupons for Target’s produce and bakery section.  Fine by me.

But I was thrilled the other day when I checked out my latest catalina stash from the checkout.  1 FREE 8x8 Shutterfly Photo Book (worth $29.99).

Naturally I re-read it several times because it seemed too good to be true.  Waaaay too good.  But it is true indeed.  SHOCKINGLY WONDERFUL.

The coupon expires at the end of March, but I wasn’t going to let this $30 goodie be forgotten at the bottom of my purse.  I ordered it stat.

I had to create an account on shutterfly.com.  No prob.  It took 30 seconds tops.  The site is really easy to navigate, so I found out where to enter my promo code from the catalina coupon and it immediately registered that I had a credit of an 8x8 photo book.  Easy peasy.

All I had to pay was $8 for shipping and tax.

It took a little while to make the book, maybe 3 hours.  You can select a pre-built theme – mine was a tangerine ‘this is our life’ type of format, which was just right.  You have a lot of flexibility to work within the format, if you don’t want their pre-made stickers in certain spots or want to change backgrounds.

I'll take some good shots when it arrives.

In my 20 free pages, I covered all of 2011 for the D family!  So don’t forget to check those catalinas at the check-out, and keep these online scrapbooks in mind for future use.  They’re way more economical than buying a lot of scrapbooking items from stores like Archiver’s.

PS, remember when Lori talked about her Target RedCard savings?  Well, I’ve saved almost $30 so far this year.  CRAZY!