As any parent knows, having kids is expensive. Preparing your children for the beginning of the school year can get very pricey if you don’t do it carefully. Thankfully, many office supply stores have great sales right before the new school year begins! Here are some tips for spending less and getting more to prepare your children for school.

• Plan ahead. Coming up with a comprehensive list of supplies needed for the school year before you begin your shopping. This will help you to find the lowest prices for supplies, as well as avoid impulse buys and repeated trips to the same stores. When getting children ready for a new school year, streamlining your shopping can go a long way towards preserving your family’s sanity. Many schools offer lists of needed school supplies – if your child’s school does not have this, ask a teacher or request a grade-specific school supply list from Office Max or Office Depot.
• Check the sales. In the weeks before school starts, stores have sales on all sorts of school supplies: usually including pencils, pens, crayons, paper, glue, notebooks, binders, folder, calculators, dictionaries, and much, much more. Depending on the store, they may have all art supplies on sale, or most office products and computer supplies. By reading about the sales, saving coupons, and keeping track of discounts, you can get some excellent deals on these supplies that you are guaranteed to not see for the rest of the year. Target always has deeply discounted sales, as do Office Depot, Staples, and Walgreens.
• Stay organized. Some stores, in addition to having sales and coupons, will provide mail-in rebates. Many people do not bother to send in rebate forms, but the money really does add up! In order to get money back from these rebates, you will need to have your sales receipt, the rebate form, and sometimes the UPC code from the packaging. Since losing any of this information will make you unable to receive your money, you will want to keep track of all of it. Keep information for each rebate in its own envelope or folder until you send it in. Remember that the sooner you send in the rebate, the sooner you’ll get your money!
• Get to the dollar store. A surprising number of essential school supplies can be found at the dollar store or other discount stores. If you’re not picky about brand names, you can probably find notebooks, loose paper, binders, scissors, pencil sharpeners, and other essential school supplies for much less than you would in other stores. If you are looking for brand-specific school supplies, it still may be worth your time to check out discount stores, as they can be full of surprises.
• Think outside the box. In addition to what you know your children will use in school (pencils, paper, and crayons), what are some other school supplies that are not as obvious but that may be cheaper now than later in the year? Kleenex, Band-Aids, stickers, posterboard, staplers, and envelopes all may come in handy for your family or your child’s classroom. These can usually be found for very low prices during back-to-school sales at Target, Office Depot, or similar stores.
• Think about the less fortunate. Sadly, this often includes teachers. Many schools are so strapped for cash that teachers spend hundreds of dollars of their own money getting ready for a new school year, buying everything from pencils to Kleenex to emergency kits. If you have a little bit of disposable income and want to help your child’s teacher, buy some extra supplies to be given to children who come without anything. If you find a really good sale, think about buying a class set of crayons or notebooks. At the low back-to-school sale prices, this might not cost you much, but your child’s teacher will be extremely grateful! If you donate a substantial amount of school supplies, most teachers will be happy to write you a letter documenting this on school letterhead so that you can turn this into a tax deduction!

This entry was posted on Monday, August 20th, 2007 at 8:15 am and is filed under Money saving ideas, Sales, Shopping Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.