GNC has quite a few different deals going on right now. Here are just a few of them:

• Get 20% off any single item through April 30th.
• Get 20% off your entire order with your gold card during the first week of each month at GNC.com.
• BOGO 50% off on all Vitapaks, FRS Chews, and select vitamins and herbs.
• Up to 40% off on Muscletech products.
• BOGO Free on Pro Oats Bars as well as CytoGenix.
• 20% off all boxed bars.
• Free Brookstone Spa Wrap with $50.00 order.
• Free Muscletech t-shirt with orders over $75.00.
• Free Ahava gift set with orders over $30.00.

Gaiam has two great offers going on right now. You can choose the one that saves you more money. The first is that you can get 10% off your entire order. All you have to do is put code AFLOVE2 in at checkout, and you’ll get the 10% off.

If on the other hand, you’re buying a bit more, you can save $20.00 off your order, as long as you spend at least $100.00 on that order. If you want to use that coupon, enter code AFVLN2 at checkout.

Both of these coupon codes are good throughout the month of February.

Buy.com has a 1TB G-Force External Hard Drive for $99.99, regularly $119.95. Shipping is free.

Under Armour has free shipping on any order when yo use code UAWINTER now through the end of March. Usually shipping is only free when you spend at least $99, so this is a great deal if you wanted to buy only one or two items from them.

Buy.com has MicroNet DVD-R 4.7GB 16X 2 x 50 Packs for $14.99 after a $5.00 rebate, regularly $29.95. Shipping is free. This is a great price for 100 DVD-Rs.

I recently got the book “Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day” by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois out of the library, and decided to try it. I had tried making bread once before, but it was such a pain and was so time consuming, I didn’t think I would ever try it again. Once I heard about this book though, I knew I had to try it.

First off, there is no kneading, or anything else complicated. It took me less than 5 minutes to mix up the ingredients with a wooden spoon, and put it in the fridge overnight. The next day all I had to do was take some of the dough out of the fridge, let it sit for 40 min, and then cook it. It couldn’t have been easier.

One of the big questions is…was it any good? I was shocked. It tasted REALLY good. I was really excited! I loved having the bread, and to know that I have enough dough for 3 more loaves sitting in my fridge makes me happy!

The next question is – how does the cost compare with buying a loaf of bread at the store? Well, I can’t exactly compare it since this is more of a nice bread you’d get at a bread store instead of a loaf of white bread, but let’s try to compare them anyway. At the store, you can spend anywhere from $1.00 – $4.00 for a loaf of bread. With the ingredients used in this loaf, a plain regular loaf of bread cost me about $0.55 a loaf. Granted, the loaf is a little bit smaller than a regular loaf..but it tasted really great. Plus, you know exactly what is in it since you made it yourself. Which also means you can add additional ingredients if you like a special type of bread.

Also, that was just me buying the ingredients at my local grocery store.  If I decide I’m going to start making bread more (which I probably will), I might get the yeast and flour at Costco, which I’m sure will save me a lot  more money.

One of the things I really liked was the size of the bread. Every single time I buy a loaf of bread, I always end up wasting at least part of it. There is no way 2 of us can go through a whole loaf before it goes bad. Here, I have up to 2 weeks to make and the 4 loaves, and this way it works out perfectly.

I will note that depending on what you have in your house, you will need to buy a few items if you don’t bake often.  You’ll need a pizza peel and a baking stone.  I got both of them together for $15.00 and then 20% off at Bed Bath and Beyond, and it worked well for me.

So from an economical standpoint…is it better to make your own bread, or just buy it? I’d say there really isn’t too much of a difference, especially if you just buy what’s cheapest. But if you like being able to control exactly what is in your bread, and you enjoy making homemade items, then this book is really for you! I really can’t stress enough how easy it was. I look forward to trying a few of the other recipes before I return the book.

A&P has some great deals going on this week with their “Bonus Bucks”. The way this works, is that you have to spend X amount on certain products, and then you’ll get x dollars back (in the form of a catalina when you pay for your groceries). For example, there are a certain number of Nestle products where if you spend $30.00 on them, you’ll get $7.00 back. That might sound like a decent deal, especially if you have coupons…but it’s really even better than that.

The $30.00 you have to spend is BEFORE sale prices. So you don’t really have to SPEND $30.00, to get the $7.00 back. Here’s a great example. For the Spend $30 Nestle and get $7 back, one of the items is Lean Cuisine. At my store they are all over $4.00 regularly…most being $4.19, and some even more expensive than that. In the ad, they are on sale 5 for $10.00, or in other words, $2.00 each.

The way you would THINK it would work, is you’d have to buy 15 of them, spend $30, and get $7 back. Well…since it goes by regular price, you can buy just 8 of the Lean Cuisine, spend $16, and get $7 back.

I did this earlier today, and it worked fine. Not only that, but I got an additional catalina (the coupon that comes out after you pay to be used for your next trip) for $1.50 when I buy more Lean Cuisine! So if I go back later in the week (which I will…) I can buy another 8 Lean Cuisine, give them my $7.00 catalina from that offer, use the $1.50 catalina that also came out, and I will only have to pay $7.50, and will get another $7.00 off my next order (and while I’m not 100% sure, since I’ll be buying many Lean Cuisine again, I’ll probably get another $1.50 catalina as well.) Not bad, right?

Now you don’t need to buy Lean Cuisine to get that type of deal, I just used it as an easy example. There are 10 different bonus bucks offers in this weeks paper, going on through the end of Thursday. You can do one of each offer at one time, so if you want to do the same offer more than once, you’ll have to do separate orders. I was happy with the deals I did, and will be going back later in the week to stock up some more!

I finally got a chance to go to A&P for triple coupons today. I wasn’t all that excited since there wasn’t too much I was planning on getting, but I had a bunch of things I would get very close to free – or free. I even figured I’d get there early in the day so that things would hopefully be in stock.

All I have to say to that, is sometimes it just doesn’t work out the way you planned. Absolutely everything I was looking to get was out of stock. If it had just been a sale item I could have gotten rainchecks, but while I could get a rain check for the items, it wouldn’t triple coupon after today…so I was out of luck.

I was really surprised too, since especially with the Viva paper towels you could see the big empty area where they usually go, so they normally have a lot in stock.

So, even when you plan to do well, it doesn’t always work. I probably should have gone earlier in the week instead of the last day of the sale, but I just didn’t have any time.  So know that even if you plan a perfect shopping trip, it won’t always happen…but don’t give up!

Now through Thursday, July 17th, A&P has Triple Coupons!

This means that any coupon under $0.99 will be tripled, so a $0.75 coupon will actually take $2.25 off of your total.  Even a $0.50 coupon will take $1.50 off of your total, so you see how fast your total can drop!  This is a great time to take all of your high valued coupons to see what you can get. It isn’t unusual to find items for free during triple coupons, so if you take your time looking through the coupons you have, you’ll probably find a bunch of items you can bring home free. I hope to be going later on in the week. Have fun!

Sometimes, buying the floor model can save you a LOT of money. I can understand why for certain things you would want to make sure the item you buy is in the box, has all of the manuals, is brand new, and has no scratches or dents, but sometimes that just isn’t important.

Take for example a small stereo. We were looking to buy one for our house. Our house was built with speakers in the ceiling of each room, and was set up so that all we needed was a portable stereo that we could hook up, and we would get great music in each room.

The problem is, with the one we had since we moved into the house, you could only play the radio or 1 cd at a time. Since the stereo is kept high up in our laundry room, it was very inconvenient to get to, so we decided to get a new one that would play mp3’s, and have a better remote than ours did.

Since this was definitely a want, and not a need, we weren’t willing to spend more than $100.00 on it. So, we went to Best Buy to take a look at what they had. They had a few different choices, but one in particular caught our eye. The Panasonic SC-EN37 Micro System had side speakers that we could easily take off and connect the wires to our system, so that was most important to us. It plays mp3’s, so that was great as well. It even would play an iPod, so although we don’t have one now, if we got one in the future, it would be perfect.

What was even better, was that it was normally $129.99, but was on clearance for $79.99. That was a great price, so we were excited. Of course, because we like to shop around, we then went home and did some research online, finding out that first – it is a good product, and second – that WAS indeed the best price around. So this past weekend, we went back to Best Buy to pick it up.

Guess what? They were all sold out, and only had the floor model left. Since it looked in good shape, and we could see that it worked, that didn’t bother us. We did ask if we took the floor model, what kind of discount we could get off of it…and this is where I was shocked. The sales woman told us we would get it for $39.99. Talk about excited! We were told that there was no box or instructions, but let’s face it…it’s a simple stereo, we didn’t need instructions, and if we really did, I’m sure we could find them online. We didn’t care about not having a box. It was worth the $40.00 savings not to get a box!

So we ended up getting a really nice new sound system for our house for $39.99, regularly $129.99.

So while getting the floor model might not sound ideal, if you really want a certain model, but don’t want to pay the full price, it’s a great way to save a little bit of money! Usually the store will be willing to negotiate as well, so you might get an even better deal. It’s definitely worth checking out!