Money-saving new apps for the new year

Jan. 5, 2012 (WPVI) -- If you're like me, you like the savings that frequent shopper cards can get you, but you don't like carrying them around.

Here's some good news: there's now a app for that! And it's one of several helpful, money-saving new apps for the new year.

Rowan Adjunct Marketing Professor Jennifer Regina helped me lose weight this year -- by taking a load out of my purse, using an app called "KeyRing." You use it to scan the barcodes from your loyalty cards into your phone. They're organized alphabetically by retailer. Then you can just show your phone to the cashier at checkout.

She explained, "Choose Acme, for example, it'll have the card, the actuall UPC, and they'll scan it and you'll actually receive the same discount as if you had the physical card."

The Lemon App is time and money saver that helps you organize receipts, so if you have an item to return, there's no dispute at the store over the purchase price.

Regina says, "You can take a picture of your receipt -- or say, you've purchased seomthing online, you can have the receipt emailed to the app -- so, if something happens, it breaks, you have this great inventory of what you have purchased."

The DealMap app is another money-saver. It uses your phone's GPS to find deals you can use right away, wherever you are.

Regina says, "There's top deals, daily deals, looking for restaurants, bars, hotels, more than 50% off, and kid-friendly."

Each day DealMap lists more than 400,000 offers. And Regina says they were just bought by Google, so that number's expected to go up in the coming months.

She also recommends the Grocery IQ app. You scan product bar codes into your phone to create a shopping list -- and it'll show you what coupons are available.

Experts agree that shopping from a list and sticking to it is a key to saving money at the grocery store.

Finally, Reginas suggests checking out two sites, that aren't apps, but can still help you save. CamelCamelCamel tracks pricing on Amazon products. CamelBuy does the same thing for items at Best Buy, so you can follow the pricing and purchase when what you want goes on sale.

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money saving, online saving, food savings, saving with 6abc, amy buckman

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