You would think THIS is the time for big savings on school supplies! Of course every store out there has some sort of sale going on. According to the Winn Dixie sale flyer this week if you purchase one of their participating backpacks for $9.99, you will get a box of 24 crayons, a 10 pack pencils, 5 duo tang folders and a composition book free (a total of $9.67 in savings). This is really a good deal if you need backpacks, however if you got two of the BOGO backpacks at Walgreens last week, this might not help you. It seems that many of the stores have “something” that’s a good buy, but I’m thinking that if I have to run to 6 or 8 different stores to get the one or two deals that they have, I’m gonna be spending too much in gas!

Let me now tell you the secret that WE have done the past few years! When my quadruplet grandbabies (Denise’s quads) started pre-K – and Jacob, the big boy going into First grade, the lists of school supplies were pretty BIG! We said at that time – “this is a lot of stuff if you only have one child, but when there are 4 in the same class plus the first grader, this is a LOT of stuff to buy”!!!

Here’s what we did – of course we had to buy everything for that particular year, HOWEVER we also printed out the school supply lists for all the grades (pre-K through 6th grade). We got what sales we could for that first year, THEN after school actually started, the BIG BIG school supply sales started. Everywhere – WalMart, K-Mart, Walgreens, CVS the Navy Base Exchange – all the stores – simply wanted to get rid of the excess school supplies. WHOOHOOOO!! Did we ever get some GREAT deals for the kids for the NEXT year! We got crayons for 10 cents a pack, the duo tang folders for 8 cents each, packs of the ruled paper for 50 cents each, big bottles of hand sanitizers for 75 cents (reg $2.99/$3.99) and on and on — and the BIGGEST deal of all was when I ran into Office Depot for a few things and saw a cart FULL of the school pencil cases for ONE CENT EACH!!! Guess how many I bought —- enough for all the kids for every grade through 6th grade!!!

I have a closet in my office where we store all the supplies that we’ve bought at these “after school starts” sales, and a few weeks before school starts we dig out bags for each of the kids and start filling them with supplies from the closet according to what’s on the lists. Normally the only things we have to buy are the 3 boxes of kleenex per child, 2 rolls of paper towels per child and the 2 containers of clorox wipes per child. We can usually find those things on sale at some of the grocery store weekly sales, so we are able to keep the actual back to school spending down to a minimum.

Get a list of what your school will require for NEXT year for each of your children and beginning the end of August through the middle of September take perhaps a day or two to run into the stores you normally shop at (hit Walmart first!!) and take your list with you, and I can guarantee that you’ll be spending much less for next years’ school supplies.