Cashback Stacking - How I save money on groceries.

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There are lots of cashback credit cards, supermarket loyalty schemes etc on the market these days. If you're into frugal living, you may have heard the term "cashback stacking", which refers to the practice of combining as many of these benefits as possible to squeeze the maximum value out of your spending. Here's an example from my own experience. One good thing about where I live is that I'm within reach of several supermarkets. I shop most often at Asda and Morrison's, and also sometimes at Tesco. Naturally I'm registered with the reward schemes at all three supermarkets. In addition, I have a thing called a Blue Light Card, which gets me an extra bit of cashback at Asda - that's in relation to a job I no longer have though, and the card expires towards the end of the year. I'll use that benefit as long as I can. Additionally, I make all my grocery purchases with cashback credit cards, which I pay off in full every month so I'm paying no interest. The cashback on those credit cards is never more than half a percent, but it's better than nothing. Finally, I'm registered with a website called Topcashback, which has a feature on it that allows me to buy supermarket gift cards with a cashback of around 2%-2.6%. Naturally I use my cashback credit cards to purchase those, and I use the cards to pay the bulk of my grocery purchases. So you can see how stacking works - use cashback credit cards either directly or to buy gift cards (which themselves come with cashback) and acquire loyalty points when I check out at the supermarket. And there's another wrinkle that I found. A bit over a year ago, I registered with an online service I'd heard about called Nielsen IQ. There's a waiting list, but when they accept you there's an app to download onto your smartphone. When you get home from your grocery shopping, you open the app and use your phone to take a picture of the receipt, then also use your phone to scan the barcodes of everything you've bought. Once that data has been uploaded, your credited with points, which you save up until you've got enough to buy various types of vouchers that they offer. It took me about a year, but I saved up enough points that way to purchase a £100 virtual Mastercard. If you don't know what a virtual Mastercard is, instead of sending you a physical card, they supply you with the card number, which you can then use for online purchases. So I earned enough points and bought a £100 virtual Mastercard. Not bad for doing hardly any work, but like I said, I like to squeeze as much value out of my transactions as possible. So I then went onto Topgiftcards and used the Mastercard number to buy £100 in shopping vouchers - specifically five £20 Asda vouchers. And this earned me 2.6% cashback. So Topcashback credited me with £2.60 for buying £100 in shopping vouchers, using the virtual Mastercard I earned from Nielson IQ. A total value of £102.60. Not quite free money, but pretty close. And there's the chance to squeeze one more bit of value out of this deal. When you've got enough cashback money saved up in your Topcashback account, you can withdraw it to your bank account - or you can use it to buy more shopping vouchers, and if you do that they give you a bonus, which varies from shop to shop. The best that they're offering at the moment is Tesco, at 5%. Makes sense, doesn't it? So that's how cashback stacking works, combined with the "free" money I get from scanning receipts. All the shops and services I mentioned are in Britain, and obviously MyLot is an international forum, but I'm sure overseas MyLotters can apply the idea to their own situations. It's easy enough to do, you just need to keep your eyes open for the opportunities and apply a basic level of organisation. There are probably extra tweaks I could apply that I haven't thought of yet, so any suggestions would be welcome. "Look after the pennies, and the pounds will look after themselves."