As summer comes to a close, the back-to-school shopping ads are blitzing the airwaves and cramming mailboxes. Stores are clamoring for your school supply dollars, knowing that you'll probably spend between $200 to $500 per child for supplies and clothes. You have a choice: get frugal or go broke.
The beginning of the school year marks a fresh start for students. A new teacher, new subjects, and invariably, new clothes and supplies. At first glance, the required supplies don't appear all that imposing. On their own, a box of pencils and some erasers don't seem like they'd cost all that much. But add all the items together, and the final tally can be staggering.
While these annual expenditures shouldn't bring your household budget to its knees, it nevertheless will be a huge cost to absorb. To make your dollar stretch further, you may opt for some of the following cost-saving measures.
Raid your own art closet
Any parent who has cleaned up her kid's art area knows that there's a treasure trove of supplies right in your own home. Kids accumulate spare pencils, crayons, and scratch paper at a dizzying rate. If you comb through their supplies and compile all the mismatched items, you'll be surprised at how much you'll find that can save you money.
Don't let this gold mine go to waste. Mix and match until you have a set of supplies that match your school's requirements. Chances are you'll make a small, but painless, dent in your kid's inventory of art supplies.
Shop until prices drop
As a consumer and a parent, you're highly valued by retailers. Back-to-school shopping is like Christmas in August for retailers, and they'll be doing whatever it takes to attract you to step inside their stores. A time-honored promotional technique is to dramatically mark down one specific item, and then keep the other items at competitive prices. Using this "loss leader" to attract traffic tends to work, as consumers prefer parking their car in one place instead of driving from store-to-store.
If you have time, patience, and a host of stores within close proximity of each other, drive around to different ones, and buy only at the loss leader. Hopefully, there are enough stores offering a big enough variety of choices to make the trips worthwhile. You could also select a store that will match the prices of its competitors: If you show up at these places armed with circulars, you could save a bundle.
Other methods for cutting costs include encouraging kids to do their own personalization of supplies by using funky paints or stickers, or allowing kids to pay for extra items out of their own pockets. Back-to-school shopping doesn't necessarily mean you need to raise the financial white flag. With a little pre-planning and some shrewd shopping techniques, you can save a lot of extra money. And if you're really ahead of the curve, you'll invest those extra dollars for your child's future college tuition.
