Shopular

Many couponers tend to avoid the big malls whenever possible, because malls often have expensive stores that don’t offer coupons or deals. Even if some mall shops do have bargains, it can be hard to find out about them because most of these stores don’t have circulars or TV commercials announcing their current specials. If, for instance, your favorite fashion shop has a one-day sale offering 25 percent off everything, you may not find out about it until a friend shows you the adorable jacket she got at a deep discount -- but by that point you’ve missed the deal.

Fortunately, there is a way around this. The Shopular app can give you the lowdown on which stores have the best deals, coupons, and sales at any given time.

Love Tory Burch, True Religion Jeans, Neiman Marcus, and Coach purses, but you never come across deals on them?

Then Shopular is your new best friend.

The Shopular app goes where many of your favorite tried-and-true couponing apps don’t venture. It gathers the latest deals from stores like Abercrombie & Fitch, Hollister, and the stores listed above. You’ll find everything from coupons to “one day only” sales, to updates on when particular deals end.

When you log into the app, it will ask if it can track your location (like many apps do), and then it will offer you an option of filtering the deals based on your local malls. A list of malls will come up, and you can click on the one you plan to visit so you can see the very best offers there.

The stores that have money-saving coupons available will show a red stripe in the upper right-hand corner of the offer (as shown in the photo above on the deals for Hollister, Aeropostale, and Coldwater Creek.) The stores with other deals, such as discounts on certain items or deep discounts on all clearance, will just be listed without the red stripe.

In addition, if you want to find out whether your favorite shop is having a sale, you can click the magnifying glass in the upper right-hand corner of the app and then search for a store by name. You can click on the "heart" symbol on any particular coupon or deal, and then it will be added to your personal deals list. To access that, just tap the icon at the top of the page that has a heart with a circle around it followed by the word "list."

One of the coolest things about this app is that it has a link to the week's circulars.

This is helpful for me because it always seems like I have no plans to visit a particular store, so I send the corresponding circular into my recycle bin...only to find that I need to hit that store later in the week but have no circular.

Overall, I find Shopular to be incredibly useful for those treks to the mall. You'll save money on high-end brands that may have cost you full price in the past.