Welcome to How I Save Money. I have been hearing about the Grocery Game and other variations of shopping CVS so I decided to give it a try to see what that was all about.

When you shop at CVS and sign up for their Extra Bucks plan you get points of varying amounts that you can use as cash in the store. One thing many of the other people neglected to say is that the points expire in one month so you really need to track what you get and when it goes bad.

There are items throughout the store that have extra bucks on them and you get these on your receipt after you pay. The extra bucks come out in the form of a coupon that you can scan on your next transaction.

Each set of CVS bucks prints as its own coupon so if you buy three different items that all have extra bucks then you would get three separate coupons printed.

For my first trip to CVS I decided to go easy since I noticed that the prices of things were much higher than at Walmart, which is where I normally do my shopping. My purchases were as follows:

Item: toothbrush

Price: $3.99

CVS Bucks earned: $3.99

Item: travel pik

Price: $2.79

CVS Bucks earned: $2.79

Item: Purex (buy one get one free)

Price: $5.99

CVS Bucks earned: $0.00

Item: neutrogena conditioner

Price: $6.99 (less $0.50 manufacturer coupon) less $1.00 CVS buck from Baz = $5.49

CVS Bucks earned: $1.00

Total spent with tax less coupons $19.77

Total CVS bucks earned $7.78

Now I realize that I could have done things differently and saved a little money by using the CVS extra bucks to pay for the purchases I had made. If I bought each of the items separately and used the coupons from the toothpaste to pay for the conditioner then I would have saved on the tax paid and on the total price.

I am new to the CVS model so I just wanted to get a few items and some extra bucks at the same time.

Since the CVS extra bucks for the toothbrush and the travel pik were the same as the price it is (almost) like getting it for free. The store says it is like you get the item for free…but you do need to remember that you pay tax on the total amount. And it is only free IF you end up using the extra bucks to pay for something else later on.

If I decided to stop today and never buy anything else at CVS then the extra bucks are useless to me and I did not get the items for ‘free’.

I am going to roll over these extra bucks so please do come back and see if I can save money at CVS!

Do you shop at CVS?

Do you use a shopping rewards program?