Friday, March 4, 2016

Using SavingStar to Boost Our Grocery Budget

SavingStar is mainly an app to earn cashback when you buy the items featured in their grocery offers. I did recently realize that they also have a way to earn cashback for online shopping, but there are only a few places and the only one I imagine myself using anytime would be American Airlines. While I haven't used the online shopping part of SavingStar before, if you do use those places it seems to offer one of the best percentages cashback for those places.

Depending on the store, to get cashback you either link your loyalty card or upload the receipt. The only linked card I've used is for CVS and the cashback is usually in my account within 48 hours. They do sometimes take awhile to process receipts, but I've never had an issue with getting credit even when it's processed after the offer expires as long as I submit before the offer expires.

The grocery offers in SavingStar typically include one healthy offer a week, various product offers that mostly update at the beginning of the month, and some one or many brand offers. They used to have a freebie offer almost every weekend, but it now seems to be only once a month if at all. I think the healthy offers have also been missing some weeks, but most recently they seem to be back to every week (they change on Tuesdays).

The healthy offers vary to sometimes be vegetables and sometimes fruit. We rarely take advantage of these because they tend not to be things we use or something else is on sale that makes it more worthwhile to get that instead.

The regular offers are the ones we use the most. Almost every month they have some Yoplait, General Mills, and Pillsbury offers. Our favorite are the Pillsbury ones as almost every month we manage to get some crescent rolls for pretty much free when we match a sale with a newspaper or printed coupon and then redeem the offer on SavingStar.

Sometimes the One or Many offers are useful, although a lot of times they just aren't worth it for us. This is partly because they are things we don't buy, but also it seems to be that the brands they are for end up not being the ones on sale during that offer period. A lot of times we only end up halfway to them and I rarely buy stuff to finish it off unless it's a good deal on those items anyways. They really can make the products an okay deal on their own though as it does tend to be a good amount back such as $3 when you spend $12 or $4 to $5 when you spend $20.

My main problem with the One or Many offers, though, is that they rarely seem to process the receipt to give you the exact credit of what you spent. Sometimes it ends up being more than what you paid, but sometimes it ends up giving you credit for less than what you paid and I just don't care to even try to contact them so I have no idea if they have good customer service to fix if you try or not.

Overall SavingStar is probably my favorite of the cashback apps. The amount of offers does tend to be limited, but there are consistently ones on things we buy anyways. Also, it's nice that the cashout minimum is $5, which is why it's my favorite ever since Ibotta went to a $20 minimum.

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