Monkey Joes and a Lesson in Being Cheap

For Christmas my husband's cousin got my two older kids gift cards to Monkey Joes. I had never been there before so I looked online at their website- it's basically a big building with bouncy houses and other fun kid stuff in it.

It looks like a fun thing to do with the kids and I don't have to worry about almost killing them at the park. Plus the baby is so little and it's been cold out so I don't like to drag her outside so the kids can play. The Monkey Joes in my town charges about $9 per child and $5 for two year olds which seems to be a fair price, especially since the kids get to run around like maniacs somewhere other than my house. Even though I have gift cards my frugal self decided to sign up for their emails to see if maybe I would be blessed with a coupon of some sort.

Guess what? Minutes later I had a coupon for buy one get one free admission. I saved myself $5 (what my daughter's admission price would have been) and will therefore have stretched our gift cards out a bit further.

Yes, I could have been content with just going and spending our gift cards with abandon as they were free to us but why not make that "free" money last longer?

The lesson in this is always sign up for newsletters and emails from companies because you never know when that 30 seconds of typing will snag you some awesome savings (if you don't like getting tons of promotional email, sign up for a free email account where you can have this sort of stuff sent).