How did I pay $1.31 / gallon for gas this morning, you ask???

The Kroger / Shell deal:

Kroger does fuel points…for every dollar you spend at Kroger (excluding alcohol, cigarettes, etc.) you earn 1 fuel point.  When you accumulate 100 fuel points, you can use your Kroger card at Kroger gas pumps, or at any Shell station and receive $0.10 / gallon off of your fill-up.  You can redeem up to $2.00 discount at a time (previously $1.00)

Kroger also offers (everyday) 2X fuel points when you buy gift cards from them (excluding Kroger, Visa prepaid, and a few others).  For example, if I buy a $25 gift card, I receive 50 fuel points.  If I buy $25 in groceries, I receive 25 fuel points.  A few times each year Kroger offers 4X fuel points on gift cards, so  $25 gift card, earns you 100 fuel points.   The last time they offered this, we were buying a play set from the Home Depot, so we picked up the gift cards from Kroger first.

Here’s how we earned so many fuel points during May:

End of year teacher gifts, birthday gifts, and graduation gifts.

I got my husband a $15 Subway gift card (Subway is his “back-up” lunch sometimes) giving us 60 fuel points.

I bought myself a $15 Starbucks gift card earning us 60 points.

We knew we were going to spend over $100 at the Home Depot, so we purchased a Home Depot gift card from Kroger which earned us 400 fuel points.

We also bought $300 in Shell gift cards, giving us 1200 fuel points.

Our regular groceries earned us around 450 fuel points for the month.

We racked up a little over 2600 points in May.  We used 2,000 points today and recieved a $2.00 discount when we fille up.  The next fill-up we can use our remaining 600 points and recieve a $.60 / gallon discount.  We took both cars (to maximize the number of gallons purchased at the discount) to the pump, scanned our Kroger card first, and then used one of our Shell gift cards.

Here’s my advice on buying the gift cards – only buy them for stuff you know you will use.  It doesn’t do you any good to spend $500 on gift cards to save $50 at the gas pump… However, we always try to buy gift cards from Kroger (because we shop there anyway) if we know we are going somewhere.  We usually buy Shell gift cards as well...Shell is where we buy gas anyway.  They have a big selection…iTunes, a lot of restaurants (fast food and sit down), Gas, Jiffy Lube.

Points accumulate in the same month, but don't accumulated from month to month but you have until the end of the following month to use points.  I can use my May points during May and June.  July 1st, they expire.

Here's a link to Kroger's website for more details...

Gift cards: 
http://www.kroger.com/gift_center/gc/Pages/default.aspx

Fuel Points:  ...I can't get the Fuel Points link to open...but if you go to "In Store" and select "Save on Fuel" from the pull-down menu, you can check back later.  I know it exists, I've read it before!