The husband and I use our Capital One card for all our everyday purchases, because it has by far the best rewards of any of our cards: three points per dollar, which we cash in for gift cards. Five thousand points gets you $50 at Amazon, Target or a bunch of other places; we manage to accumulate one of these every six weeks or so.
Up above, you can see what came in the mail for me today. After the jump, the details.
Like I know I’ve mentioned a dozen times, We Are In An Economy at my house, and thus trying to save money wherever we can. Unfortunately, I fell in love with Olay Regenerist skin-care stuff about two weeks before my husband was laid off. I know it all depends on your perspective, and compared to some stuff Olay isn’t pricey at all, but for us right now, $20-plus for a little bottle of moisturizer is a lot, especially since I “need” three of them (one for day, one for night, one for eyes).
So we have been using the Amazon gift cards for my diva-esque skin-care needs.* It’s a little, delightful luxury, and it doesn’t take the place of anything else in our budget (there’s not a list of other things we need from Amazon but are foregoing). In this shipment, I got a bottle of their eye serum ($11 at Amazon, $22 full price, so buy it at Amazon whether you have a gift card or no, is my advice) and a bottle of the daytime moisturizer with sunscreen ($18 at Amazon, $22 full price) for free.
I also got — and I am delighted about this — a bottle of Bath and Body Works’ Temptations brand three-in-one … Stuff. It’s shampoo, body wash and bubble bath, allegedly, though I only ever use it for shampoo. I love it, and I love the way it smells and the fact that one $12 bottle lasts me three months, so of course Bath and Body Works discontinued it. I was freaking out, honestly. I mean, here was a product I liked so much I actually wanted to pay money for it. I’d get it on sale if I could, but if not, I was perfectly happy handing over full price. THIS NEVER HAPPENS. And they discontinued it. It was the end of the world, until I found out that some Amazon retailers still sell the stuff. And it is eligible for free Super Saver shipping, no less! So I got a big old bottle of Dreamy Chocolate Mint shampoo for free as well, and I could not be happier.
The receipt says I paid $9 and change, so why am I saying all this was free? Because I also got a book for myself and one for my mom, so my total order was $59-something. I paid with $50 in gift cards and $9 out of pocket, and Amazon broke it down in such a way that I was billed the $9-something for this part of it and not the book part of it. That’s semantics, though. This stuff was free and there is no better price than that.
*Every now and then we do use the rewards points for something else. We got our awesome Dyson vacuum cleaner for $75 this way — Target was having a sale where it cost $300 plus they would give you a $75 gift card for buying it, and we saved up $150 in Target gift cards and paid $150 out of pocket for the vacuum, for which they gave us $75 back. We are still so proud of this that we tell people every chance we get, which is probably why we don’t get invited to a lot of parties.
It’s not limited to being retired. Exactly the same point happend to me after losing my job, and others who lost theirs at the same company. All your friends seem to believe you have something contagious, or nothing in common anymore, even after all the emotions and feeling shared thru the years. It’s a shame and people ought to be ashamed of themselves. I guess they figure that since you don’t share the perform that there are no common feelings anymore, or just maybe it was a farce to start with…there was never any friendship to begin with.
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