PHOENIX — If you still need to tackle Back-to-School shopping for your family, Passionate Penny Pincher is here to help!
"Your typical, basic, everyday school supplies that you need, those are going to be on sale like every week," said Shannon McCaig.
She's one of the moms working hard to find the best discount codes and prices on the Passionate Penny Pincher team.
"We love to help other people and especially love helping cutting budgets and helping mamas that are just trying to survive," said McCaig.
Right now, her passion is finding the biggest discounts on Back-to-School supplies.
"I do like every store: Walmart, CVS, Kroger, Publix, Walgreens, Walmart," said McCaig, "I match up the store deals to coupons that are available and rebates that are available. I do this every year and I'm always shocked at the prices. Wooden pencils have gone up like crazy, which is crazy to me, and binders have gone down from last year. So, it is kind of crazy how every year it's different."
Passionate Penny Pincher makes it easy for customers by putting together a School Supply Store Price Cheat Sheet.
This breaks down the prices for popular items like binders, notebooks, and pens and shows what each store is charging so customers can see where prices are the lowest.
"That's kind of what this started as a long, long time ago just to be able to make it easy for our readers. Whenever they're in the stores and they can see that Kroger might have something for you know, 25 cents. Well, they can look here and say, 'Oh wait that's 50 cents at Walmart.' We try to make it as easy as possible for our readers to find the best school supply deals because we're a bunch of mamas that need to save pennies," said McCaig.
She tells us one tip for families hoping to save money is to try and hold off on buying all school supplies until the end of August when stores will really slash prices.
"If you can, wait to do your school shopping after school starts. If you can get your kiddos to get by with the bare minimum, a lot of those stores are going to put items on clearance. All of those stores, they don't need all those school supplies. They only have it, as you said, like seasonal so they're gonna want to get rid of them. So, you can get it up to 70%, even 90% off sometimes," said McCaig.
Also, make sure you are getting enough school supplies to last through the whole school year. Because if your kids run out of something, there likely won't be any discounts when you need to restock.
"If you know that your kids are going to go through a lot of pencils, then buy a lot of pencils. We have a bin, like a plastic bin and we throw all the school supplies in whenever it goes on sale, and then whenever my daughter needs something, she can just take that bin out and grab what she needs. And that way we're not paying full price throughout the year," said McCaig.
To sign up for the Passionate Penny Pincher emails and see all the deals they find, click here.