1/30/2011

The one where purchasing an iPhone is a money saving venture. Sorta.


I love my iPhone.  I may have mentioned it occasionally.  I'm not entirely sure how I managed to survive the first 36.57 years of my life without one.  

It tells me which direction to go when I'm lost.

It tells me how many calories to eat.

It tells me what groceries I need to buy. 

It tells me the weather.

It allows me to set my DVR to record, even if I'm sitting miles away at a restaurant and I suddenly remember that I haven't set up to record the season premiere of American Idol.

It allows me to stay connected to Facebook and Twitter, 24/7.

It can even make phone calls!  

I sleep with it.  I take it to the bathroom with me.  I never, ever, ever put it down.

My iPhone and I, we're besties.

But in the spirit of saving a few dollars here and there, I also use my Phone for some serious couponing. I mentioned before that Kroger, my grocery store of choice, has an app that lets you load coupons directly from your iPhone onto your Kroger card.  You can do this in the store, even.  Last week when I was doing the grocery shopping, I loaded $5.75 in coupons from my phone to my card as I was shopping.  Every little bit helps pay for my data plan, ya know...

There are also several other apps that I use regularly to help me save a few bucks.  Here are some of my favorites:

RedLaser - this app uses your iPhone camera as a barcode scanner, then goes out searching for better deals on what you just scanned.  Lemme give you a for instance.  When I was Christmas shopping, I used it to scan a particular toy that I was looking at for zj.  The app searched both online and in nearby retail stores and told me to get myself in my car, drive myself up the street to Target, and save $10 on it.  Pretty nifty.

The Dealmap - this app uses some sort of magical GPS mojo to know what you are near, and it searches for coupons at restaurants and retailers near you.  Today I found a 20% off coupon for your entire purchase at Michael's, and a buy one get one free deal at Subway.

GeoQpons - this is another magical app that knows where you are and finds coupons for you to use.  Some currently features deals are a coupon for 25% off at The Children's Place and $7 of an oil change at Jiffy Lube.  Really, there is never any reason to pay full price for anything.  Except maybe your iPhone.  You'll probably have to pay full price for that...  Anyway, moving on...

Cellfire - you can use this app in conjunction with your loyalty savings card at approximately 30 grocery chains.  You can register your loyalty card to the app, and download coupons directly onto your card from the app.  I see a future that does not contain paper coupons at all.  Yes, I'm psychic.  It's just one of my many talents.

foursquare - Ok, this one isn't exactly a coupon app.  It's more of a social networking meets GPS kind of thing.  Think Facebook places, where you can check into different venues, but WAY cooler.  I mention it because I have probably used this one more than any other for money saving purposes.  When we were Christmas shopping, RJ and I went to an outlet mall, and about 1/3 of the stores offered some sort of discount just for checking in there.  We saved 10-25% off at most of the stores we shopped in by opening foursquare, checking in, then showing the cashier the coupon code on the screen of our phone.  Also, some places offer special deals to the Mayor of their location.  The Mayor is the person who has checked into that venue the most.  For example, Rally's offers a free milkshake to the Mayor every day, and Pizza Hut offers a free large order to the Mayor with each pizza purchase.  I say if you're going to go there anyway, at least get all you can out of it...

Whew!  It's been fun, but I'm tired.  I have exhausted my bag of money saving tricks, so now you can go back to reading some of the great money-saving blogs out there, and I can go back to posting pictures of my cute kids and writing blog posts about getting drunk.


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