All About Kimberly

With rising gas prices, utility prices, grocery prices. With the price of everything increasing, finding smart ways to shop has become increasingly important. We rely entirely on my teacher’s income in my house. No outside child support or such. Just my paycheck each month. I don’t know if you know much about Texas teacher salaries, but they aren’t that high (at least not if you choose to live in rural areas) so I’ve been finding ways to cut corners, save money. It’s important to me that we take family vacations, the girls can participate in extracurricular activities, take lessons…I want them to have amazing opportunities.

In Texas, we just finished tax free weekend. This is one weekend each year that most clothing and shoes under the price of $100 are tax free. With three of us needing back to school clothes, that savings adds up. But now that is over, and I am looking forward to my next big day of savings – Black Friday. Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving when stores run major sales. If you have never taken advantage of these sales, you’ve seen the chaos on the news.

Here it’s not only an important way to save and be able to purchase items for Christmas, it’s also a family tradition. Last year I knew we would be going to Florida so that I actually didn’t need to buy the girls anything, but still had to get up and go. My mom and grandmother and I load up ever year. We separate to do some of the shopping – each taking the others’ lists to whatever stores they’ll be going to. We are typically finished by about 8:30 or so that morning and then meet up for breakfast before going home.

I can remember the days of buying the newspapers every day for a week, anxiously waiting the sale papers to tell us what bargains would be available, but now thanks to the Internet, we usually have our lists complete before the sale papers come out. We double check them to the sale ads, but so far, they’ve been entirely accurate. Last year thanks to a rewards program forum I participate in, I found out that you can also do a lot of your blackfriday shopping online. I actually gave that list to my dad as he refuses to fight the crowds. He was excited to be playing the game with us as he found some great deals (and we were excited to have one more person to give us even more stores to cover).

Finding sites with reliable sales information can be troublesome, and if they aren’t reliable, you turn out to have wasted your time and maybe missing some sales. One site that I’ve bookmarked to track the sales this year is BlackFriday.biz. They are already posting ads for this year! Yes, in August, we can already start anticipating those sales for some of our favorite stores such as Wal-Mart and Best Buy. Scared you’ll forget about this site before November arrives? Sign up for the email alerts, and they will let you know each time they get a new sale ad. How convenient is that?