If bargain-hunting was a religion then paying the full price for those household goods and personal items you use regularly would be the ultimate in cardinal sins! This is the one component of your personal finance management you need to make work for you otherwise you just keep wasting money unnecessarily!

I’m not just talking theory here – my bargain-hunting and couponing skills have been honed through my resolution to get a bit of “my own back” with regards to those consumer goods I buy regularly. After all, I need to be rewarded in some or other way for being loyal to certain brands, don’t I?

Bath & Body Works Walk-Through

Truth be told, the Bath & Body Works brand has become my favourite by way of some personal and household goods I use regularly, some of which are used by the others in this household as well, including shower gels, lotions and candles. I personally also use some of their fragrances and home fragrances, so it’s safe to say I’m a regular buyer.

Okay, so naturally if one wants to save money on anything they buy, they have to know what the actual retail prices of those items are. There’s no better way to do this than to visit the physical store from whence you usually buy…

And if you shop online, that’s even better because you don’t have to waste any money on fuel. So in the case of my Bath & Body Works goods, I simply go to the home page of their direct online store, although I must say that by now I have a solid idea of what all the retail prices are.

Next I kill two birds with one stone, searching Google directly for coupons, special promos and discounts.

Google’s auto-complete search suggestions will lead you to the promised land, but it’s important to complete the search for coupons while logged in to your Google account (Gmail, etc). This way you kill two birds with one stone in that on the one hand you’re searching directly for instant discounts you can get, while on the other hand you’re telling Google that you are interested in a specific set of products and more specifically, you’re interested in any special offers around the product or set of products.

Right…Next I use a platform called Dealspotr to search for coupons because I know they always have quite a bit which offer massive discounts for my goods.

The key is to first look on the home page to see if there are any featured coupons, which I often find is the case for my Bath & Body Works merchandise. Just scroll down the home page…

…and then to see all the discount deals available for your brand / product(s), run a search of the Dealspotr platform by simply tying the brand name in.

Since I do most of my shopping for these items online, I like to take advantage of the free shipping offers, which in some instances means I can get items which aren’t in stock locally. The trick to it though is to go for the biggest discount you can get, like for example a 75% discount on orders over a certain amount. What this would then mean is that since I buy items like soap every single month and since these items don’t expire, I can buy in bulk and take receipt of a good supply of the products at a much, much cheaper price than what they’d cost me if I bought each of them individually, every single month.

As time goes by and Google sort of “knows” what you’re all about, the discounts and special offers will follow you around. If you’re reading any blog for example which serves Google ads, you’ll see more and more of those ads targeted to what you’ve been searching for while you were logged into your Google account.

Complementary to that, the last thing I tend to do is to “scrape the bottom of the barrel” by running a Google images search of coupons available for the current month. Some of these that come up can even be printed and used in store, at a physical retailer who carries my Bath & Body Works products.

And last but not least, going back to the Bath & Body Works direct online outlet, they have a “Top Offers” page which lists all the products that are currently on sale, some of which are individual products while others are bundled offers. Naturally if there is a product I already use then I don’t hesitate to buy it, but it is through this Top Offers page where I often get to sample some of the products in the Bath & Body Works range which I hadn’t really previously or regularly used. It’s just my way of being able to test more of their products without having to pay full price for them.