I've spoken before about ways that we try to save on fueling the motorhome ... once again, one of my favorites is using Gas Rewards from Stop & Shop.
Yesterday, I put 35 gallons of fuel in the motorhome - the maximum gallons you can do at once with gas rewards - at a cost of $1.479/gallon, for a total of $51.76 We saved $2.20/gallon ($77.00 !!) by using our Stop & Shop Gas Rewards Points.
The strategy is simple
Yesterday's 35 gallons was *I think* our best yet. We accumulated 2200 points mostly by paying attention to the weekly circular AND using special coupons that only come in the circulars that are delivered to the house.
A quickie overview:
- Every $1 you spend in the store = 1 gas point. Accumulate 100 gas points, get .10 cents off per gallon.
- Points expire 30 days after they are "earned" so you have to pay attention to your points and the day they expire. You can do this online or with a mobile app
- You can purchase a maximum of 35 gallons of fuel at a time
- There is a cap on the discount, I think it's 2800 points
The best way to earn extra points is in the circular:
- most weeks you can earn bonus gas points if you buy x number of special items
- some weeks have extra coupons like earn 300 bonus gas points if you spend $50 and use this coupon
Over the last 30 days we earned 1500 bonus points by spending about $90 on "bundle items", which really equated to 1590 points, the other 610 points were spent dollars over a 30 day period. This includes food, paper goods, laundry detergent, etc. Some weeks the bundles are good and make sense for us, some weeks they don't. Then there are bundles that I wish we took more advantage of as with some, you can buy up to x number of bundles in a week.
The bundles this last week made sense for us and were pretty cheap:
- Canned Olives 2 for $3.00 - buy 5 get 300 bonus gas points
- Large Sweet Baby Ray's BBQ Sauce 2 for $6.00 dollars - buy 5 get 300 bonus gas points
As we use both these items, we bought 10 BBQ and 5 olives earning 900 bonus points PLUS the points earned for purchasing them. Earlier in the past 30 days we bought other bundles to earn us bonus points.
In hindsight, we should have bought more olive bundles. That week you could buy up to 10 bundles and earn 300 bonues points for each bundle. With the olives AND maximizing the points by using them for the maximum number of gallons, the store actually PAID us $2.00 to take the olives off their hands:
- 5 cans of olives $8.00
- 300 gas points = .30 cents off 35 gallons = $10.50
Spend $8.00 to save $10.50 off of a fill up - not a bad deal. Certainly if you're only filling up the car with those points, you might be closer to 18 - 20 gallons, so the FREE money only adds up best when filling up with the maximum fuel allotment.
We're heading out to the NASCAR race at Pocono on Thursday, so the timing on this fill up is great.
And ... about 45 days ago I used the same strategy to put in 35 gallons at a price of $1.79/gallon ($62.65 total). That's an average price of $1.65/gallon on my last full tank of fuel for the motorhome.
Let's not even talk about the money we make (and/or get refunded) with can returns. We've spent a lot of time over the last 6 months in RI that does not COLLECT a .05 cents bottle return - yet all the cans we buy and get from our friends are still stamped with a .05 cents return as both CT and MA have returns. We save them up, transport them back with us in the motorhome and then return them for .05 cents each in CT when we're back home.
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