We all like nice things, but nobody wants to walk into a store and pay retail because that can be way too much. Thankfully, there are a lot of things you can buy that you should never pay full price for. With a little patience, some planning, and a willingness to look beyond the obvious places, you can often find exactly what you need for far less than retail, and sometimes even for free.
Here are eight things we routinely buy for less than retail, along with the strategies we use to find the best deals.
Books
I recently found a thrift store in a nearby town that I had never visited before. All of their books were 99¢ each, and they were very well organized. I came home with several additions to my reading stack.
Our favorite local used bookstore is another great source for inexpensive books. They have a cart out front that always has free books on it. I recently found a copy of what was my favorite book when I was about sixth-grade age. Free is a pretty hard price to beat.
If there’s a specific book I want, one of my favorite online resources is AddALL.com. You tell it what title you’re searching for, and it searches multiple used-book sellers and lists the results from least expensive to most expensive. They even include shipping when calculating which option costs the least.
Recently, I wanted a book that had been recommended to me. I found it on Addall.com for $1.75 plus $2.25 shipping, making my total cost about $4.
Of course, my favorite source for books is still the library. My newest library trick is to borrow a physical book and then check to see whether the audiobook is available at the same time. I play the audiobook, which is often read by the author, while following along in the book. If I can’t get a physical copy, I can sometimes borrow the ebook instead.
Between the library, thrift stores, used bookstores, free books, and online used-book searches, there are plenty of ways to keep a reading stack without spending a fortune.
Clothing
At least once a year, I go through my clothes and sort out what I’m no longer going to wear or what doesn’t fit. I use the KonMari method of folding because it makes it so easy to see exactly what is in any given drawer. Going through my clothes is also a good reminder that you do not have to pay full price in order to dress really well.
Like a lot of frugal people, thrift stores are one of our favorite places to look for clothing, but they aren’t the only option. Clearance racks and end-of-season sales can also give you substantial savings on new clothing. Before you see those ultra-low prices and start filling your cart, just remember, the important thing is not to buy something simply because it’s cheap. It’s only a bargain if you’re actually going to wear it and need it.
Furniture
Furniture is another category where we never pay full price if we can possibly avoid it, but that doesn’t mean we never buy furniture new.
Buying New Furniture for Less
I love our sofa. I lie on it and read my books, but every time I sit on it, I remember that we purchased it brand new from a furniture company. It was a special order, but it was also 45 percent off.
There is nothing wrong with going to a retail store. In this case, we waited for a good sale, and we had a sinking fund saved up because we knew our 20-something-year-old couch was eventually going to need to be replaced. We knew exactly how much we could afford to spend before we started shopping.
Finding Great Furniture Secondhand
If you don’t mind sitting your behind on something other people have sat on before you, though, there are some fantastic deals on used furniture. We have an Eastlake-style chair that is probably from the late 1800s. We found it at a thrift store, and it had been reupholstered shortly before it was donated. It is incredibly comfortable, and it cost us $50.
We’ve also found furniture and home décor sitting at the curb for free. One of our oak picture frames was a curbside find. When we found it, the frame was covered in really bright orange paint. It was so sad. We stripped off the paint and gave the frame a new life.
More recently, we found four dining room chairs thrown out at the curb. I cleaned them up, and I’m planning to reupholster the seats. The seats come off easily, so this should be a fairly simple project. I’m probably not going to pay retail for whatever I buy to reupholster them, either.
Before buying furniture new, check thrift stores, resale shops, online marketplaces, garage sales, and other secondhand sources. If you decide that buying new makes more sense, determine your budget ahead of time and give yourself time to wait for a good sale.
Groceries
There are three main places we store food: the refrigerator, pantry, and freezer. I organize our pantry a lot like a grocery store because I want to be able to see what we have and keep track of it.
One section of our pantry is dedicated to gluten-free foods because our son Daniel’s fiancée has celiac disease. I deliberately used this section as an example because we hear from people all the time who say, “I’m on a specialized diet, and I don’t know how to cut my food bills down.”
Saving on Specialty Foods
Specialty foods can be expensive, but there are still ways to save.
One strategy is to contact manufacturers and ask for coupons. Manufacturers will sometimes send high-value coupons, and occasionally you may even get a coupon for a free product.
We also watch markdown sections at major grocery stores. For example, I found gluten-free pasta marked down to just 54¢.
Don’t overlook discount stores for groceries, either. We recently found a huge box of instant potatoes at Ollie’s for $2.99. I love fresh potatoes, but in the middle of a Midwest winter, you can sometimes be stuck in your house for two, three, or four days waiting for the plows to come through. It’s nice to have something quick and easy in the pantry.
You can take some vegetables out of your freezer, sauté a few things, make a little gravy, top it with those potatoes, and make yourself a dynamite shepherd’s pie for almost nothing.
Look in Other Not-So-Obvious Places
Twice a year, we also visit an Amish community about an hour away from us. We order some foods in bulk, but the stores there also have highly discounted, salvage foods. On our last trip, we found gluten-free rice noodles for 99¢.
Those examples (and other strategies) have allowed us to buy specialty foods for substantially less than the normal retail price. It’s worth the extra time and effort to use them, particularly when you know the foods you regularly use and recognize a genuinely good price when you see one.
Household Supplies
Household supplies and personal care items can take a chunk out of your budget. They’re also items that can fit into our “never pay full price” framework if you know what you normally spend and keep enough on hand that you aren’t forced to speed to the nearest store and buy them the day you run out.
Don’t Assume Store Brands Cost Less
Plastic storage bags are a good example. We buy Walgreens-brand bags most of the time, because Walgreens periodically runs a sale where you buy one and get two free. We’ve found the bags to be really good quality, and we haven’t had problems with them splitting open or springing leaks.
I’ve also found name-brand Ziploc bags on clearance at Kroger. This is a good reminder not to assume that the store brand is automatically less expensive than the name brand. If the name-brand product is on clearance or you have a good coupon, it may actually cost less than the generic version.
The same principle applies to dish detergent. I found Palmolive dish detergent in Kroger’s clearance section for 99¢ because Apple Orchard was considered a fall scent. It smelled perfectly good to me, so I bought eight bottles.
Know How Much Your Household Uses
Before you decide how many of a deeply discounted product to buy, it helps to know how long that product lasts in your household. When you open something, take a black marker and write the date somewhere on the container. When you finish it, you’ll know exactly how long it lasted. That information helps you decide how many you should buy the next time you find a great deal.
One bottle of dish detergent lasts us three or four months. If I want to have a year’s supply on hand, I know that I need at least four bottles. For the record, I bought eight of the 99-cent bottles, which means we have dish detergent for at least two years. It will last that long sitting in the cupboard, and at that price I was happy to stock up.
The goal isn’t to fill your house with products simply because they’re on sale. It’s to know what you use, how quickly you use it, and what constitutes a good price so you can stock up within reason when the right deal appears.
Gift Wrap and Gift Bags
I recently got tired of digging through closets every time I needed something to wrap a gift, so I finally created a dedicated space where all of our gift-wrapping supplies are stored together.
Looking through that newly organized closet reminded me just how easy it is to save money on gift wrap.
After Christmas, I found generic gift wrap at Ollie’s for $1.35 a roll. Because the design doesn’t scream Christmas, there’s absolutely no reason it can’t be used for birthdays, weddings, and other gift-giving occasions throughout the year.
Then there are gift bags. Here’s my friendly reminder: If a bag looked lovely when someone gave a gift to you in it, it will look equally lovely when you put another gift in it and give it to somebody else.
Save your gift bags.
Gift bags, boxes, tissue paper, and other wrapping supplies can often be reused several times. Keeping all of those supplies together also makes it easier to see what you already own before you go out and buy more.
Outdoor Furniture
One of my favorite frugal concepts came from my dear frugal friend Julie, who says you should always have a KAEOFI list.
Keep an Eye Out for It
KAEOFI stands for “Keep An Eye Out For It.” I call it my KEOFI list, because it just sounds doggone fun when you say it and makes the idea easy for me to remember.
The principle is simple. We don’t automatically jump at the first opportunity to buy something the minute we think it needs to be replaced.
Our patio furniture is a perfect example. We bought one table and chairs set for about $50 at a thrift store. Another patio table was purchased on end-of-season clearance for a substantial discount, and we had an additional 10% off coupon to stack on top of the sale price.
Unfortunately, some of the chairs that came with that table haven’t held up very well. We started with four chairs, and we’re now down to about one that is still functioning properly because the canvas on the others has broken.
The cushions, however, are still perfectly good, which leaves us with a decision to make. We could buy higher-quality replacement chairs that will work with the cushions we already own. We could buy less-expensive chairs that don’t need cushions, or we could find another use for the cushions and start over with the patio furniture.
I even tried putting the cushions on our 1950s front porch glider, which we found thrown out at the curb years ago. I’m still not sure whether that’s going to be the solution.
Give Yourself Time to Find the Right Deal
The fact that we haven’t decided yet is part of the lesson. When something breaks or wears out, you don’t necessarily have to replace it immediately. Putting it on your KAEOFI list gives you time to watch sales, check secondhand sources, compare your options, and figure out what will work best over the long term.
Waiting is one of the simplest frugal strategies there is, and it costs absolutely nothing.
Cars
This is the category where people tend to have really strong opinions. We don’t purchase brand-new cars. We always purchase used vehicles.
You may completely disagree with us on this one, and that’s okay. For our family, cars are something we choose to never pay full price for.
Buying used is only one part of our strategy. As soon as we purchase a car, we decide approximately how many years we expect it to last and what we think we’ll have to pay to replace it. We divide that amount by the number of months available, and that’s what we set aside every month in a sinking fund.
This means we begin saving for the next car while the current car is still working. When it eventually needs to be replaced, we aren’t starting from zero and suddenly trying to figure out where the money will come from.
The same strategy can be useful for other large purchases. If you know something will eventually need to be replaced, estimate when you’ll need it, determine what you expect it to cost, and start setting money aside before the expense becomes an emergency.
By using all these strategies, you can not only avoid the “buy it now” bandwagon, but also start a revolution called “Never pay full price”.
Your Turn
What do you refuse to pay retail for? What are your best strategies to never pay full price? Tell us in the comments
Read More About Paying Less
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