4 Ways to save on back to school + $100 amex giveaway!

How do you save money on back to school shopping? It begins to seem ridiculous when you pay the participation fees, registration fees, book fees, sports fees, band fees, class party fees, PTA fees = Fee’d to death. I try to concentrate on the things I can actually control how much I spend on -- I love to save money without a lot of effort, so here are a few tips I use for back to school shopping:

1. Always, always check for a coupon before checking out. Most likely, there is one! Ask an associate if there is one online, or search for the store name + coupon, or a site like Retail Me Not. Every store we hit while shopping in Montana (no sales tax!) had an additional discount coupon we pulled up on my phone. It adds up –these sweaters were $2.97 and $6.97 on the clearance rack at JCPeneny, and then they had an additional 15% coupon we pulled up on our phone. Score!

2. Go through closets and decide what is really needed for each child. If you are armed with a list of “needs” it will be much easier not to get distracted by sales and bright signs and stick to the budget.
3. Check for neighborhood/community clothing swaps. Our church has one every August – everyone brings their outgrown clothes, uniforms, Halloween costumes, and winter coats, and then they separate them by size. You help others out and might score some soccer cleats that will be outgrown by next season that you didn’t want to shell out $40 for.
4. If you have an American Express card, sign up for Amex Offers. We use credit cards. We have a budget, and we pay them off every month and get some awesome rewards. This is one of them.

You simply sign in, and choose which offers you want to save to your card. The offers are relevant to where you’ve shopped in the past and your current location. No coupons, no clipping, just shop like you normally do and the savings will add up as statement credits on your bill. That’s it!
This month I have offers from stores I shop at anyway like Dollar Tree, JCPenney, Sports Authority, Best Buy, Whole Foods, Crazy 8, and PF Changs. And you can still use coupons and store deals! This past weekend, JcPenney was having their big sale along with $10 off $25 coupons. We went underwear and socks shopping and divided them up into a couple of $25 transactions to save the most. My son has been begging for Nike socks, and they weren’t included with the coupon, but they were included in the buy one, get one half off and I knew that I would be getting the $10 back on my statement, so it seemed much more reasonable. He got his name brand socks, I got my deal, we were all happy.

To welcome us back to school, we are giving away a $100 American Express gift card to a lucky reader! Tell us in the comments: what do you/would you like most about AMEX offers? Good luck!

Sweepstakes Rules: No duplicate comments.
You may receive (2) total entries by selecting from the following entry methods:

1. Leave a comment in response to the sweepstakes prompt on this post
2. Tweet (public message) about this promotion; including exactly the following unique term in your tweet message: “#AmexOffers” and “#SweepstakesEntry”; and leave the URL to that tweet in a comment on this post
3. Blog about this promotion, including a disclosure that you are receiving a sweepstakes entry in exchange for writing the blog post, and leave the URL to that post in a comment on this post
4. For those with no Twitter or blog, read the official rules to learn about an alternate form of entry.

This giveaway is open to US Residents age 18 or older. Winners will be selected via random draw, and will be notified by e-mail. The notification email will come directly from BlogHer via the sweeps@blogher email address. You will have 72 hours to respond; otherwise a new winner will be selected.

The Official Rules are available here.

This sweepstakes runs from 8/4-9/1.

Be sure to visit the Amex Offers brand page on BlogHer.com where you can read other bloggers’ posts!