Want to know how to buy your family’s clothes for next to nothing? Stick with me throughout this article and I will teach you how to save up to 95% off your clothing budget. As many of you super savers already know there are a few techniques you can use to get great discounts on clothing, but if you learn how to combine these techniques you will be amazed at how much money you can save! I’m going to start off explaining a few savings methods you may already know and the wrap it up with the techniques to use in order to maximize savings.
For the most part America is a “living in the present” society. The majority of us do not plan ahead, and financial statistics will prove that a small percentage of us even have a savings account with a balance of $1,000. That’s why my first technique may be obvious however; difficult to implement. Clothing stores often mark down their clothing as much as 85% toward the end of a season. Most of us will wear the same size clothing one year later so why not take advantage of the sales? Store the clothes away in a storage tote and break out your new, extremely discounted clothing the following year. Sure, it may be a season old, but I would be willing to bet that the majority of us wear clothes for longer than one year anyway. My wife often buys new, brand name clothing for our children for $2 and $3 per piece using this technique.
Second, use those coupons! Almost every clothing store will issue some type of coupon in the local paper or on the internet. These coupons may only be for 10% – 15% discount but if you were going to buy the item anyway, why not save a few dollars. When using coupons always read the fine print, often coupons exclude certain items including items that are on sale or on clearance. If you get to the checkout counter and they won’t accept your coupon don’t be afraid to walk away. In order to avoid a voided transaction the cashier may honor the coupon anyway.
Take advantage of discounted gift cards. Gift card resale is becoming a very popular trend and many websites and businesses are completely designed around the resale of gift cards. They offer to purchase gift cards that you won’t use for less than face value and in turn resale these gift cards to someone who will use them for a small profit. For example, you may receive a $50 gift card for Dicks Sporting Goods as a Christmas gift. You know you will never use it so you decide to sale the gift card for $40 to a gift card resale business. The resale businesses will in turn sales your card to someone else for $45. You get $40 for your gift card that you would never use and someone else saves 10% from purchasing your gift card, everyone wins!
Now that you have read the saving techniques you may already know where I’m going with this, but if not let me explain. Simply combine two or three of the techniques for extreme savings. Let me give you an example to further explain. I start my search on a gift card resale website. I purchase a $50 Kohls gift card for $45. My wife loves to shop at Kohls because their off season clothing prices are great and usually you can use a coupon even on clearance items. Let’s assume it’s the end of summer and their discount is 85%. I buy $350 worth of clothes and after the 85% discount my total is $52.50. I use a coupon that is 15% off your total purchase that brings my total to $44.63. Sales tax adds another $2.68 for a grand total of $47.31. I use my $50 gift card to pay the balance and get back $2.69. My total percentage saved after all discounts is is almost 88% and that’s not including the discount on the gift card, not bad. I just bought $350 worth of clothes for $47.31.