While at shopping today I was paying a lot of attention to the prices and stocking up on things that were either on sale or at a good discount for buying in bulk. We’ve gotten a little spoiled these past couple of years by making good money and spending rather freely. Now, the economy is going in the tank – pun intended with the cost of gasoline at $4.01 a gallon now – and we need to cut back on the spending.

One way to make the dollar go farther is to use coupons and plan your shopping around those kinds of bargains. The wife has an online coupon site that she always checks before buying big ticket items and now we check it before going out shopping for all our purchases.

For example, we used to go to one of the local discount eyeglasses stores with the $39 vision exams and the two for one price on eyeglasses. But the wife wanted to go back to contact lenses, so we decided to price shop on that before getting pressured into buying them from the optometrist. We found good prices on the internet and with the discounts on the coupon site we can save a lot of money. With the new prescription we can order Acuvue and Freshlook lenses at cheap prices online and have a 6 month supply delivered to our house.

We had to buy a wedding present for one of my employee’s getting married next month, so we found coupons for linens and housewares and spent about an hour browsing the store for a gift. To wrap up all our gift giving duties for the summer we also took advantage of discount online shopping for handbags, wallets, backpacks and luggage.

With summer here and mosquitos becoming a problem each evening, we decided to stock up on heartworm medicine for the dogs and found some great deals online for pet meds instead of buying them for full price from the veterinarian. Still have to get the rabies shot from the vet, but we don’t have to pay full price for the Heartguard anymore.

While at the mall I saw some cool NHL gear at the Reebok store. But instead of paying full retail price at the mall, I went online at the coupon site and found some great discount deals on Reebok for both online orders and a coupon if you want to go back to their retail store. But since I can order online and have it delivered with free shipping, it doesn’t make sense to spend the gas money to go to the mall and fight through all the crowds anymore. I would rather just order from home and have it delivered, then spend the extra time and money on other things.