New Month: New Upromise E-Coupons--Easy Way To Put Away $$ For College!

Upromise is a great program that makes it easy to put away money for your child's college education just by doing the things you normally do.  They have a ton of options for earning, including cash back shopping through their site, earning back a percentage of your everyday purchases from linked store reward cards and debit/credit cards.  They even have their own credit card that you can get if you so choose, and it gives back a higher percentage of any purchase made using it.

My favorite way to save using this program is with their monthly e-coupons.  Each month, they have a group of selected e-coupons for you to choose from.  You click to load them to any store savings card you have linked in their system (a process that simply involves typing in the number on the back of your card one time--you should do this during registration so you can earn back a % of your spending anyway).

If you purchase any of the items at the store, the value of the e-coupon is not deducted from your total at the register, but placed into your Upromise account for future withdrawal by your children.

The best thing about this is that you can still use paper coupons along with these e-coupons!  Also, some of the coupons on Savingstar have been the same in the past (not currently), so I am very interested to see if credit will be applied to both accounts when an item is purchased.

Here is one scenario as an example:

No Yolks pasta recently had a $0.40/1 printable coupon on coupons.com (no longer available).  

Upromise currently has a $0.40/1 No Yolks that can be loaded to your shopper cards.

Last week Tom Thumb had these on sale for $1.25 (the sale may have ended, but its a frequent occurrence).

Buy a No Yolks for $1.25.  Use $0.40/1 printable (will double).  Pay just $0.45.  Then, another $0.40 will be deposited into your Upromise account, so in essence you paid only $0.05 for your pasta!  Not bad, huh?

Here's what you do:

1.  Register with Upromise if you haven't already, or log into your account.

• Make sure all available shopper cards are registered in your account for maximum savings opportunities.  Even CVS is available on this program!

2.  Click the tab at the top that says "Coupons & Deals"

3.  Click the blue button at the top that says "Grocery eCoupons"

4.  Browse the coupons, and click to activate any or all you would like.

5.  When you are done, you can print/email your list to yourself for easy reference.

6.  Shop as usual!

The coupons can take up to a month (in my experience sometimes longer, but they do show up!) to be credited to your account.

In the past, new coupons appeared on the first of each month, and expired on the last day of each month, but this time I noticed a few carry-overs that had a much longer expiration time.  They early in the month you load them, the longer you have to use them, though.

If you'd like to try this program out, get started today.