Writing much about combining savings strategies, I know many forget which savings strategies work together.

In the midst of rebates, member savings, rewards, and cash back sites, one can easily forget a savings strategy or get overwhelmed and stop before getting started.

Picking and choosing savings strategies is a skill which one can learn. Even knowing the options, I still forget or miss an opportunity (see my cash back decision below).

I’m on this journey to using time wisely. While I find spending time researching and fine-tuning savings strategy skills worthy of my time, you might need to use your time wisely investing in your family, education, ministry, or home.

But as I learn and use these savings strategies, I will share what I have and am learning to do to purchase needed items while paying less than the sale price. In starting this series yesterday with shopping and adding up the cost of our new range, I continue today with the savings strategies I chose to use when purchasing our new range.

Part 2: Implementing Savings Strategies for our New Range

In shopping online, I have more options for saving than entering a store. Using the following savings strategies, I worked down the subtotal to our final cost:

1. Access Merchant’s Website through a Cash Back Site

Starting with Ebates, I used the extension on Chrome (a button on my menu bar). As this extension is already setup with my login information, I only need to click the button, enter the store name – which was Sears, and start earning 3% back on my purchase.

Usually I check both Ebates and Shop at Home for the better percentage, but for some reason I forgot to check Shop at Home. Bummer! I could have saved an additional 2% as Shop at Home has a 5% back on purchases from Sears. Oh well, I’ll try to remember next time as checking is quite easy with the extensions on Chrome.

 2. Use a Loyalty Rewards Points Program

Sears, Land’s End, and Kmart (to name a few) have partnered with Shop your Way to offer customers a loyalty card. When you checkout, hand the cashier your loyalty card to record your purchase amount.

For each $1,000 points earned, you earn a $1. You can then choose when to use your rewards on your purchases.

When shopping online through Sears, I only needed to enter my loyalty card number while on the shopping cart page. I will earn points for this purchase, and I chose to use the $.91 in rewards I currently had on my card towards the payment.

3. Look for Honey Plug-in Button in Shopping Cart

Having already installed the Honey Plug-in into my Google Chrome browser, I just need to look for the little orange box when I am in the shopping cart.

HINT: The Honey box will be near the fields for entering promotional codes.

Honey will try each available promotional code. If using one of their suggested codes offers you a less expensive price, then Honey will apply that code for you.

This plug-in saves so much time as I do not need to search for a promotional code. I just press a button, and Honey does the rest.

By using Honey for this purchase, the promotional code SEARS50 was applied which deducted $50 off a $300+ Appliance order (expires 3/16/14). With this promotional code, my subtotal dropped from $496.98 to $446.98.

4. Purchase Discounted Gift Cards through Cardpool

Though the price was now below our target price, we would still need to pay around $30 for sales tax. I turned to Cardpool for Sears gift cards up to the subtotal amount. When I logged into my account, I chose the bulk purchase option and typed in the subtotal amount: $446.98.

Cardpool brought up the following options:

Using all four of these savings strategies, I was on my way to meeting our target price for our new range. Some of these savings strategies are immediate rewards while others are future earnings. However, all the savings strategies work together to help us in stretching our dollars.

Return tomorrow for the end of the story where I will give a big picture overview and present the big reveal in combining these savings strategies.

I will share the order and the way in which I used these strategies in checking out after shopping online. Until tomorrow . . . keep on saving!

Question: Which browser do you prefer to use when shopping online?