A while ago, in my #1 financial goals to achieve post, I encouraged and challenged my readers to spend 1% less of their income. This can be done by cutting back on the amount that they spent or try to earn rewards such as the PC Optimum Points while they spend or do a combination of both.
If you haven’t taken the challenge yet, or you feel that saving an extra 1% of your income is a daunting task, don’t panic. I am going to show you an easy way to comfortably achieve this goal. I’ve personally tried and tested this and I believe that you can definitely achieve similar results too if you just make the effort to try it out.
Before we start, let’s begin with a couple of statistics. I am a numbers geek enthusiast and using numbers to convince you that saving an extra 1% of your income is not difficult at all if you put in the effort. Let’s take a look at the numbers based on the average Canadian. The average Canadian’s household income is about $100K. So saving 1% of your income is equivalent to saving $1K per year for the average Canadian.
Based on the Survey of Household Spending in 2016 on Statistics Canada’s website, the average Canadian household spent about $6,176/year or $515/month on groceries. This amount to about 14.1% of their household spending. If the average Canadian can just save $500 from their grocery bills, it means that they are already halfway through their saving goal of $1,000. Saving $500 from a $6,176 is about 8% on their grocery bills.
Earn 3% In PC Optimum Points Reward On Your Purchases
To start off, I’d recommend the usage of the President’s Choice Financial’s World Elite Mastercard. If you apply through RateSupermarket.ca, you’ll get a $100 gift card once you’re approved and starting using your card. The most attractive feature of this no annual fee card is the 3% PC Optimum points reward on your purchases if you shop at any of the Loblaw family of grocery stores or Shoppers Drug Mart. So getting 3% from $6,176 in PC Optimum Points is equivalent to $185. Now, you can easily save $285 (= $100 + $185) without any efforts.
Flyer Discounts
When it comes to groceries, I am not a very picky eater. So my grocery strategy is to buy whatever items that are on sale that week. This way, I don’t have work with a set budget. I get to buy whatever I want to eat and save at the same time. It’s fair to say that by using this strategy, I can save about 5% on my grocery bill just by buying discount items on the weekly flyer. The good news is this discount can be combined with other discounts. Hence, a 5% saving of $6,176 is another $308. At $493 (= $100 + $185 + $308) in potential savings, you’ve halfway there.
Optimum App Spending Bonus
How do you like the idea of spending money to save money? Yes, you read that right. You can spend money to save money. If you register for a PC Optimum Points account and download the app, you’ll be getting weekly offers customized according to your purchase patterns. I often get offers such as spend $40 and receive 10,000 in PC Optimum Points. That’s equivalent to $10 in points or 25% off my total purchases if I stay disciplined and just spend $40. This is the first discount that I want to combine with the flyer discounts.
Bonus App PC Optimum Points On Items
Along with the spending bonus, I also get about 20 to 25 offers for the items that I often buy. For example, I often receive offers of 1,200 PC Optimum Points (or $1.20) on a bag of PC Organic milk, which I buy almost every week. It costs about $7.99 for a four-liter bag so this is equivalent to a 15% discount. I also receive variable offers such as 100 PC Optimum Points for every dollar that I spend on certain produce. That’s an extra 10% discount that I can stack on top of any other discounts.
Bonus In-Store PC Optimum Points On Items
Another bonus that works really well with my shopping habit is the bonus in-store offer for specific items. For example, there was this mouthwatering box of garlic shrimp that cost $10/box. Normally, I think that it’s a bit overpriced and would pass on it. However, when I see a bonus of 5,000 (or $5.00) PC Optimum Points, which is equivalent to 50% off and that box of garlic shrimp suddenly becomes a delicious deal. Once again, this offer can also be stacked with any other offers.
In-Store Spending Bonus
This offer doesn’t happen very often, but they do exist. I discovered this offer a while ago after I left my local no-frills supermarket. From time to time, any store can offer an in-store spending bonus. If you spend a certain amount in that store, you’ll get the bonus. This is similar to the App spending bonus. So don’t forget to pay attention to the board at the entrance of the store when you go in to shop.
Deferring Individual App Item Offers
If you see an offer for certain items that you often buy, but you don’t want to buy it yet, you can save the offer. Just swipe left on the item and pick save offer on your mobile app. This will defer that offer till next week. Otherwise, that offer may be gone as they refresh your offer every week. I use this strategy to wait for items to go on sale or to defer my purchase of perishable items.
Where Can You Earn PC Optimum Points
Depending on which area you live in, the family of Loblaw stores can be different. In my area, I often shop at Shoppers Drug Mart, No Frills and Loblaws Supermarket. See the image above for this list of Loblaw owned brands.
Stacking The Savings
Last weekend, I went shopping and got a decent discount by stacking my offers. To start, I got the app offer for 10,000 PC Optimum Points if I spent $40 at Shopper Drug Mart. That’s $10 or 25% in points if I just spend $40. So I went shopping with a $40 spending budget.
I noticed that I also got an offer of 1,600 in PC Optimum Points for every $8 I spend on the PC Tassimo coffee cups. The regular price for one box was $8.99/box, but it was on sale for $6.99/box. Bought 5 boxes, which cost me about $34.95 to earn 6,400 points. In addition, I bought two bags of chips for $5 that had a regular price of $4.29/bag. I was 5 cents short of $40, so I bought a kid’s toothpaste for $0.99. Here’s a summary of my stacked saving.
| Discription | Items |
|---|---|
| Original Price of Items | $57.20 |
| Flyer Discounts | $15.48 |
| Discount % Off Original Price | 27.37% |
| Purchase Total | $41.72 |
| App Spending Bonus Points Earned | 10,000 |
| App Bonus Points On Items | 6,400 |
| PC World Elite Points Earned | 1,252 |
| Total Points Earned | 17,652 |
| Total Savings Off Original Price | $33.37 |
| Savings % Off Original Price | 58.10% |
| Total Purchase Less Points | $24.07 |
Table #1: Stacking my PC Optimum Points Savings
Missing PC Optimum Points
From time to time, their system may miss your offers. This happened to me when I bought a couple of flavours for the PC Tassimo coffee cups purchase. I only got points for only two of the five boxes. I call their customer service and they were very helpful and added the points back to my account. So, don’t forget to check your bills to ensure that you get all the points that you’ve earned. If in doubt, don’t hesitate to contact their customer service hotline (1-866-727-6468) if you’re missing points.
My Two Cents
By stacking as many of the offers as I can, I often save at least 12% or more on my grocery bills. This number may not seem like a lot, but over a period of one year, it’s almost equivalent to getting one and a half months in free groceries. Saving money is great, but being able to save more by stacking up your discounts is even better.
So readers, do you collect PC Optimum Points? If you do, how do you stack your discounts to maximize your savings?
About Leo
FANTASTIC overview! Great detail. Well Done.
A few more things to mention:
1. when there are in-store offers like 15,000 points for $100 spent, you can break up your purchase into $100 increments and get a bonus for EACH $100 spent.
2. PC Optimum also sometimes additional discounts that look like 20,000 for every $100 spent, or 7,500 for every $75 spent (and many others), that is, 20% or 10% off you ENTIRE grocery bill, on top of all the discounts above. When you see these, try to maximize your grocery bill to maximize your savings
3. To increase the chances of getting offers from #2, my wife and I have separate PC Optimum points cards. This way we EACH get offers independent of each other. Then we just use the best one.
4. Caution…there is a feature in PC Optimum called Householding… this allows you to share your points with other points card holders, whether in the same home or not. This is a nice convenience, though not essential. Some have reported that after they registered for this feature, they started receiving less of these offers in #2. This is only anecdotal so is inconclusive but please keep this in mind. I called PC about this and they claim it should not have an impact. At this time we have opted to not use this until we get better understanding of this.
5. Don’t forget that you can also benefit from PC Optimum points at participating gas bars such as Superstore, Loblaws, No Frills, Refuel, Mobil, and possibly others across the country (though many have been converted to Mobil now). You can save 4¢/L in Ontario and 7¢/L in other provinces.
We are a family of 5 so our monthly grocery bills are not small, though we are frugal spenders. Our annual spend is a bit over the average annual mentioned above, as we have one adult “child”, one teenager and one tween…hungry mouths. As we learned this system, we have been able to gradually increase our “cash back” to over $1000 last year just from PC alone and hope to achieve the same this year.
@Smayer97, I did see the offer in a Shoppers Drug Mart flyer mentioned in point #2, a couple of weeks ago. Too bad that I didn’t have enough points to get the bonuses. I am actually trying to save 100,000 points so that I can take advantage of the offer next time.
I am also aware of the household option, but I did not set it up until recently as I do most of the grocery shopping in my household. Hopefully we can use this trick to get the best offers going forward.
Great job of earning more than $1,000/year in rewards. I guess, you’ve just proved that it’s not that hard to earn 1% of your income in free money.
Reward points are awesome! I save tons of money on groceries and things like gas!
This is an awesome post! I’m a college student and always looking to save money any way that I can. I’ll definitely be using these tips in the future. Thanks for the good read.
I tend to try to stack coupons as much as I can with both online shopping and in store shipping. 12% savings is pretty huge, that’s more than tax in my area!!!
These are wonderful ways to be able to save money. I just need to be more consistent with it and I would be doing a lot better.
I love reward points and will use them to help me save money when I shop. I also love digital coupons to pair with my reward points. Saving money is a a big deal here since we are a family of seven.
This is a very informative and interesting post. It’s always a great thing when you can save on some grocery spending!!!
Don’t really do join rewards stuff from any stores and things I shop online. But these are really informative post! Great job
Great idea! Reward points can be quite handy if you fully know how to use them. What a very informative post especially for those who are interested in saving cash.
Wow fantastic information! This is such a great reward program and point system for really saving on groceries.
A lot to assimilate here will sure save this for future reference, thanks as always for sharing.
I’m actually quite pleased with the new PC Optimum program, there’s been a lot of 20x offers with Shoppers Drug mart and even points for spending $100 at No Frills. Love the credit card, we consistently have free groceries!! We are almost at $500 in free groceries without even trying too hard.
That is such an awesome post. Reward points are totally great. I will have to check this out.
This system is really great because I find that I can use it at Superstore, No Frills, Shoppers, etc. I let my fiance take care of the groceries so I’d assume he knows what to look for and to keep an eye out when there are great point offers.
I love your shrimp picture. It’s definitely a great deal when it’s offering that many points! I also love how you showcase your example with numbers. It just looks more convincing to readers 🙂 I’m not sure if my fiance is doing as good as you are in hunting for stuff like this… haha I can’t micromanage him but I trust him enough that he cares about saving money LOL