Money-saving Sites For Shoppers

With the economy on the down these days, learning how to stretch your dollar is important but a bit difficult with all the shopping you might want to do for Christmas gifts this month. Below are some useful websites and services that will help you save some money this season (and anytime).

In addition to the coupons you love to find in MidWeek and our sister newspaper the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, there are places on the web where you can download coupons and coupon codes for both regular and online shopping.

Here are some of the best ones to visit:

* Fat Wallet (www.fatwallet.com): Out of all the sites out there, this is probably the best one.

* E-bates (www.ebates.com): This one is my next favorite, and I’ve received nice checks from them in the past few years.


* Cool Savings (www.coolsavings.com)

* Valpak (www.valpak.com): This is pretty good at searching by area when you enter in your Zip code. You’ll find a multitude of items from pizza to oil changes to window cleaning.

* eCouponsHawaii.com: A great local website to check out the deals around town.

I also noticed that Google Maps has coupons available by location, but there isn’t much for Hawaii.

Remember that online stores do accept coupons via codes. The common misconception is that you cannot use coupons while you’re shopping online. You can redeem some pretty good deals with the codes you find. For example, at the time I’m writing this, I found 25 percent off Victoria’s Secret, $10 off $100 at Home Depot, $10 off $75 at Macy’s and 10 percent off at Kmart. You’ll usually see offers for free shipping or BOGOs (buy one get one free). If you’re a loyal customer, the retailer will most likely send these types of offers straight to your e-mail. Other than the aforementioned, here are some sites that offer coupon codes:

* Retail Me Not (www.retailmenot.com): Find coupons for more than 20,000 stores by entering in your search subject in the large, easytouse search box in the middle of the page.

* Coupon Cabin (www.couponcabin.com): Offers about 2,700 printable coupons, codes and direct links to savings.

* Current Codes (www.currentcodes.com): This one isn’t bad, but you need to use the drop down menu or browse alphabetically. The other sites are a bit easier to use since you can just type in what you’re looking for.

The use of price-comparison sites can be to your advantage since some stores will match a price you find online. If you want a really good deal, make sure to print out your best online price and take it with you to the store to show to the manager. You can find this function in Fat


Wallet as well, but here are other sites that will do price comparison:

* Price Grabber (www.pricegrabber.com)

* NexTag (www.nextag.com) Shopping.com

* Cheap Uncle (www.cheapuncle.com)

As long as you have access to the Internet, I encourage you to take advantage of these deal websites!