Health & Fitness
Jackpot! A Few Bucks Go a Long Way for School Supplies
Forget about waiting for the tax free holiday ( if there even is one) for next year's school supplies. Now is the time to stock up at a fraction of the price.
You have to love it when a plan comes together. Except this morning I didn't have much of a plan, it just morphed into one. Last night was curriculum night at school. I usually ask the teachers if they need any supplies for the classroom. I got the usual requests; pencils, tissues, notebooks, dry erase markers etc. School has been in session for several weeks so I knew several of the stores would be offloading school supplies, especially as they are getting ready to put out all the halloween 'stuff'. With $6 in Office Depot rewards and twenty bucks in my purse off I went.
I hit Office Depot first, well they had been pretty much cleared out but they did have mechanical pencils in the bargain bin. Walked out of there with 12 pencils and 12 refills of lead. Paid with my Office Depot rewards and still had a few cents leftover - Ka- ching. My $20 was still intact. Next stop Walmart, there I loaded up on regular pencils, a box of 20 was going for 25 cents. I bought 12 boxes, so that's 240 pencils for $3 - not too shabby. And then it was off to Target where I hit the motherlode. Compostion notebooks were on sale for 15 cents each, 1 subject notebooks were 37 cents. Binders? Another great deal at $1.50. I wandered down to the dollar store and picked up multi packs of sticky notes for $1.
I checked over my haul:
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- 2 folders.
- 12 mechanical pencils with lead.
- 8 composition notebooks.
- 4 subject notebooks.
- 4 dry erase markers.
- 25 blocks of sticky notes.
- 240 regular pencils.
After all was said and done I still had $3 left from the original $20. Hmmm...what to do. Well, still in a mood for a bargain I visited the Wendy's drive thru on the way home. A burger and fries from the dollar menu set me back another $2.18. Yes, I know...not a very healthy lunch but I was on a roll and I felt like I deserved a little reward.
So, forget about tax free day for school supplies, it hits many of us too late anyway. Take a couple of hours and hit the local stores now. My one piece of advice - remember where you stash the supplies so that next year you don't find them a month after school starts!
