Thrifty Thursday: Saving Money on Back to School Supplies...Already!

Thursday June 11, 2009

OK, technically I haven't saved any money on school supplies yet. But I'm ready to save because many of my back-to-school, money-saving strategies involve action early in the summer.

Even though we are only halfway through the first week of summer, my kids have already asked if we could go school supply shopping. I think they are just looking for something--anything--to do. But I always buy school supplies (for the whole year) in July and August when stores are practically giving them away.

What I do this time of year is collect up last year's still-perfectly-good items, like calculators, rulers, USB drives, binders, etc., and stow them away for the summer before they're pushed under someone's bed or behind a bookcase. I also run all the book bags and soft lunchboxes through the washer, then store them. I even scrounge up the notebooks with only a few used pages, pencils with lightly used erasers and markers that haven't dried up and put them with our household office supplies. More Tips for Saving on School Supplies

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