Tuesday, December 27, 2011
As we wrap up 2011 and prepare for 2012, we are featuring posts designed to help you kick off 2012 with a plan for saving! Our goal is to bring you fun fashion tips, useful stories and of course, ways to save money! If you're looking to Join the Frugal Revolution in the New Year, this series is for you. This post originally ran in October 2009, and month after month it is consistently one of our readers' favorite posts.
So many people are getting smartphones now! While the Droid and the iPhone dominate the market, there are dozens more that are swarming the market. But while most people know about their time-saving abilities, their web apps and their social media tools, most don’t think of how they can save money with a Smartphone. In fact, most people think of a smartphone as costing them more money, because of the data fees.
I’ve actually found that my smartphone SAVES me money! In fact, it saves me well over the $30 data plan fee AT&T charges for my iPhone. I’ve been surprised by this, but its very true! I talked about it with SmartMoney.com this week, and thought I’d share with you some of my favorite apps!
- CouponSherpa takes your location and then tell you all the coupons available for stores and restaurants around you. For example, one day I was downtown for a meeting at the radio station, opened up CouponSherpa and found a coupon for $10 off + a free item at a nearby store. (Victoria Secret) I went in, the store just happened to be having a sale too. Open the coupon with the iPhone, they scanned the phone screen and out I walked. I saved $30 that day on those two items! Or there’s the time a few weeks ago I was at a conference out of town with some friends, and we wanted a place to go eat. Then I found a coupon for a restaurant nearby. Showed it to the cashier and got 15% off our meal.
- Cellfire—local coupons and grocery coupons that attach to your shopper’s card—in addition to paper coupons! If I have a .50/1 newspaper coupon for birds eye vegetables, and cellfire has a .50/1 coupon for the same item, I can use both on one bag of birds eye vegetables at Kroger. Saving me $1.50—they double the paper coupon. That’s free veggies!
- GroceryiQ lets me store my grocery list by store. I can enter items by name, or I can enter the UPC barcode, making sure I get the exact item in the list.
- Coupons.com has an app for the iPhone that will let you print more coupons if you have access to a wifi printer.
- Kraft's iFood app lets you print two more of the Kraft coupons--again, you'll need access to wifi printing for it to work.
- RedLaser is a comparison shopping app. Out buying something and want to know if you’re getting the best price? Open RedLaser, scan the UPC code and it goes to work searching Amazon and the web, telling you what prices that item is selling for!
- WalletZero—store all of your loyalty shopper cards here in one spot. Now you won’t forget any of those reward or discount cards! Enter the numbers on your barcode for each card, and it saves a barcode on the phone. Stores can scan these the same as the card—no more keyring or wallet clutter but you still get the savings. And a few weird looks…as most cashiers have never seen any of this!
- KidsEatforFree is an app that tells you what restaurants around you are offering Kids Eat Free meals right now! I love this one! Every Saturday we do a family night–church then off to a dinner out! Now we just pull up this app, see where we can get free kids meals, plus maybe a coupon out of Valpak or CouponSherpa.
- Kroger, Meijer and Target all have apps for smartphones that add extra savings options!
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