My Family’s Saving Strategies During School Season
It is an annual tradition for parents across the country. Summer is starting to end. They receive a letter from the school to enroll their student. In the store, they begin to notice hints of “back to school.” Children are dressed in too small clothes that they wear after summer games.
It’s time to start thinking about going back to school.
This post was originally published on The Simple Dollar .
When I think about the fact that we have three school-age children (our youngest is going to first grade this year), I can’t help but wonder where the time went. But now our children are chatting at the dinner table, comparing thoughts about teachers, and telling their younger siblings what to expect in the coming school year.
This, of course, means that three of our children go through the “back to school” process at once. That means buying school supplies, replacing dirty shoes, buying clothes suitable for fall and early winter here in Iowa (temperatures start dropping in September, and we could have very cold days by mid-October), and so on.
Whatever one may say, this is an expensive period. Buying school supplies and clothes for three children at once? Ouch.
Over the years, however, we have developed a number of strategies that are truly helping to reduce tuition costs, and this year, more than ever before, we are putting them to the test.
We use tax-free holidays
Many states offer tax-free holidays for certain types of goods throughout the year. This tax-free vacation gives you the opportunity to shop for certain types of items without paying sales tax, which saves you money when shopping locally. On top of that, many shops these days offer sales of tax-free merchandise.
In Iowa, for example, the state offers tax-free clothing and footwear leave on the first weekend of August. Because of this, many people are buying school clothes this weekend, and retailers often offer big sales to attract all of these shoppers. This is the perfect time to shop for things like shoes and clothes.
Other states offer tax-free holidays on other goods, from clothes and computers to school supplies and shoes.
Because of this tax-free holiday and its timing, it sets a schedule for our pre-school purchases, at least in the clothing and footwear department. We use several additional strategies on the tax-free weekend days to minimize our spending this weekend.
We actively change and rent clothes
At some point shortly before the tax-free holiday we spend some time evaluating our clothes. What else is right? What’s worn out? What can be passed on from older children to younger children? What can the youngest give to the younger relatives? What things from older relatives are finally suitable for our children?
This assessment helps us understand what we really need. It also allows us to make good use of the clothes they are wearing, plus we can “pay up front” for the clothes that are handed over to us.
Surprisingly, this process does not take that long. We simply take out all the clothes and stack several stacks – one “guardian” stack for each child and a “give or give” stack. Then we define a “keeper” stack for each child and see what he needs.
We buy second-hand clothes first of all
Before we move on to buying new clothes during our tax-free vacation, we will first shop at used clothing stores. We try first of all to close the holes in the wardrobes there, as the prices are much lower than what we find during the tax-free holidays.
That being said, we can afford to be really selective, but the best local used clothing stores usually have plenty of good second hand clothing almost every time we visit. Yes, some of them are worn and, yes, some of them are not suitable for our kids’ taste or size, but all we have to do is find one or two items and the trip is worth it.
On a typical used clothing travel, we find three or four outfits for each child, dramatically reducing our need for tax-free holiday clothing.
We shop at home first
What about school supplies?
Our first tactic is to simply “shop at home”. We go through all of our art boxes and cabinets, looking for school supplies from yesteryear and determining how many more can be used.
Things like pencil cases, backpacks, erasers, pencils, pens, rulers, etc. from yesteryear can almost always be reused. We also frequently have new items from previous shopping trips (see below) so there is even more savings.
We usually just collect reusable items, dump them all on the kitchen table, and tag the reused items on the school supplies lists.
We take advantage of the advantages of summer cottage and garage sales
In our area, as a rule, there are constant yard sales throughout the summer. There are citywide sales in different cities and towns during the spring and summer, and many people have sales outside of those dates, so if you want to visit sales, you can often find them.
What do we buy there? Everything that works is back to school. We’ve been picking up clothes, folders, rulers, art supplies boxes and protractors at yard sales over the past year or two, all literally for a pittance, all used by our kids in school.
As always, going to a yard sale is like rolling the dice as you don’t know what you are going to find and what quality, but I always seem to find a handful of gems throughout the day at yard sales.
We use flyers
Many shops – both clothing stores and department stores – produce flyers about a week before the tax-free weekend in Iowa, and they are almost always loaded with clothing sales. So, a few days before this tax-free holiday, we sit down with these flyers and plan where we’re going to buy clothes.
A few weeks after that, department stores are going to have high sales of school supplies, so we’ll sit down with flyers again and see what’s on sale that matches their school supply lists. We often end up in multiple stores because of the number of items we buy; it actually guarantees two or three stops if the biggest deals in each store are different.
To be honest, these are not always the same stores. Sometimes we have a gift card for a specific store that rocks the balance. In other cases, we will have a coupon that gives us a certain percentage of the discount at a particular store, which can also greatly affect the balance. Sometimes we buy many of our supplies from the dollar store. It really just depends on what’s happening this year, and we figure it out by looking at the many flyers.
We also use coupons
Often, besides leaflets, there are coupons for school supplies. For example, we’ll look at Target’s Cartwheel coupon app for additional coupons. While Target may not be the best choice overall, coupons can certainly help if you choose Target for other reasons (like a gift card or percentage discount) or because they have one or two specific discounted items in their leaflets.
For us, coupons are more of the icing on the cake than the main way to save money on getting back to school. Coupons are a small additional discount – I compare it to a printout of dollar bills if we buy a lot of items – but big discounts come from planning a tax-free vacation and looking for the best bargains on flyers. Coupons simply add to the stack of extra discounts.
We receive simple notebooks and folders and give children the opportunity to decorate them with stickers
Stores love to sell notebooks and folders of popular cartoon characters and pop culture figures. Of course, stores also like to label these items to an absurd degree compared to items with a plain cover next to them. It’s pretty hard to justify paying $ 2 for a laptop with Pokemon on the lid when there are functionally identical plain laptops next to them for $ 0.10.
However, it’s no surprise that our kids are drawn straight to the hieroglyphic notebooks. They want to have “cool” notebooks at school, and I understand that.
One way to “compromise” on this is to buy simple notebooks and folders, and then let the kids choose a pack of stickers to decorate the folders and notebooks as they wish. For example, if they are into Star Wars, they can buy a pack of Star Wars stickers and stick them all over the place. They can also use art supplies at home to add any decorations to their notebooks.
This gives our kids a lot of creative freedom, creates a great art project for them to work on a few days before school starts, and also saves us quite a lot of money as much cheaper laptops more than subsidize the cost of a laptop. several packs of stickers.
We limit the items children can choose
Many of the things we buy ahead of school season give our kids the opportunity to choose from a variety of items. There are endless options for shoes, shirts, pants, notebooks and so on.
Naturally, our children need at least some input to this conversation. They also don’t want to wear shirts in a color they don’t like, or carry a notebook with a popular culture figurine on the front that they don’t like. My two older children also have slightly more specific tastes – for example, my older child has very, very specific tastes for trousers.
Our way of dealing with this is very simple. We tell them we’re going to pick items, but if they find similar items for the same price, we’ll be happy to replace them as long as other items aren’t offensive (for example, we won’t let our kids wear offensive shirts or garments that are gaudy or something like that).
This gives our children considerable freedom of choice. At the same time, he also teaches them to look at prices when they choose clothes and other items. They can’t just take the one they want – they have to think about prices too. It doesn’t cost us a dime and makes everyone involved happier.
We allow them a small “budget” for products that exceed the minimum
Of course, sometimes they notice an item that they “should have.” Maybe this is a new backpack that is better than the model we chose for them. Perhaps this is a more durable and better quality laptop ( something that I personally can identify ). Perhaps this is really a pack of good gel pens. Maybe this is the coolest T-shirt they’ve ever seen.
We do this by giving each child a small return-to-school allowance that they can use to “improve” any of the items we might buy for them. For example, if we’re going to spend $ 8 on a shirt they don’t like and they find one they like for $ 15, they can “upgrade” that shirt for $ 7 from their Back-to-School Benefit.
This allows us parents to create sensible shopping lists for each child that are reasonably balanced from child to child. We don’t spend more on one child than on another (except for differences in their lists of students), so any situations where one child has something “better” than another is entirely of their own choice.
It also helps us teach our kids how to budget and how not to be jealous of what others have, while still keeping the overall school costs down.
We buy additional services for our older children if the deal is big
As our children get older, the items they need to get back to school become more consistent. They need pencils. They need pens. They need notebooks. They need erasers. These things appear on their lists year after year.
Our children also study in the same grades in the same schools as their older siblings, so the “back to school” list one of them had one year is usually identical to the list that their younger brother will have in a year. or two.
Because of this, we are closely monitoring huge discounts for loss leaders, such as boxes of pencils for a quarter or notebooks for a nickel, or composition books for a nickel, or a ruler for a quarter. When we find these sales, we will buy two, three, five or ten items right now, knowing that we can use them for the next few years while we are still learning.
We keep these extra items in a box with our other drawing supplies so that when school comes around we can simply pull out that box of unused school supplies and use them to take care of the healthy part of our list before we ever leave. House.
Basically, it allows us to stretch these top-notch sales over several years into school purchases.
This approach also has a secondary advantage. Often during the year our children come home and claim that they have run out of pencils or that they have lost their ruler. In situations like this, we can simply go to a box of very cheap supplies that we bought in bulk and pull out exactly the items they need (most of the time).
We keep an eye on potential art boxes
One of the items that appears frequently on our school listings is the art box. They need something to store markers, crayons, scissors, glue, and other similar materials when not working on an art project. The teacher usually gives some leeway regarding the specifics of the box.
Of course, if you do buy an art box in the store during your school rush, it will tend to be quite high unless you buy a very simple and basic one.
Our solution is simple: we are always looking for boxes for art objects. We don’t just use those posted with others back to school. Instead, we watch all sorts of variations of the idea, from lunch boxes to interesting plastic containers, and sometimes these items fall into our hands for free.
For example, we got some great little plastic containers with loops when a friend brought in a cookie and told us to just leave the container. The next year, this container became an art box for our daughter, and she decorated it herself with some of her Back to School stickers (see earlier in the article).
Final thoughts
It may seem a little early for some to start thinking about “going back to school,” but the reality is that school starts for many children over the next few weeks, and many of the best strategies for getting back to school take a little time. and patience. For example, it takes time to shop for clothes at several different stores, and it takes time to go through flyers from several different stores to figure out which ones offer the best deals on the items you want.
What is the reward for all this effort? The reward is that you are going to save tons of money on school purchases that every parent seems to have to deal with. You will have a lot of supplies for the moment, supplies stashed for the future, and a lot of well-fitting clothes in good shape, all purchased at very low prices.
It just takes a little time and planning to save a lot of money.
Good luck!
Our Family’s Strategies To Save Mint By Returning To School | Simple dollar