If you’re a new reader here (welcome!) it may seem overwhelming. I am what the media now likes to call a Supercouponer or Extreme Couponer. The Wall Street Journal did an article on it last winter. I can’t say I find the article very flattering. As usual, it portrays couponers as borderline hoarders who are weird and only feed their families highly processed foods.
So if you’re looking for tips on how be build a tower out of 1000 boxes of free jello, you’ve come to the wrong blog. For us, frugality is just a lifestyle. Every item we’re going to purchase, whether it be a loaf of bread, gallon of milk or roof for our house, we pause and ask ourselves “How can we pay less for this?” And after a while, when you realize you don’t have to pay full price, you don’t want to. And for day to day items, coupons are just the easiest and most accessible means to an end, for me.
Getting started doesn’t have to be overwhelming. First, subscribe to your local Sunday paper. Then, if you want to build up and getting multiple coupon inserts, consider asking neighbors, friends and family for their inserts. I would say four sets of inserts is a good start, if you want to do this. Many cereal deals are in multiples of four. And if you only want one or no inserts, that’s fine too.
The key to saving money at grocery stores and big box stores like Kmart & Target is just stacking deals. If you have coupons, it just enables you to add one more brick to the stack. You want to buy an item–try to find it on sale. See if the store is offering some type of catalina or gift card back when you purchase the product, build on that. Then, do you have corresponding coupons to go with these items? Will the store take both a store and a manufacturers’ coupon? Then, when you get home, is there a mail in rebate you can do to get more money back? Just stack the deals.
Find a drawer in your home office or some other room and pick a drawer to keep for this. Save all your receipts. You never know when you’re going to find a mail in rebate for something that you’ve already purchased. You can also keep your coupons in there. Don’t throw them out, even if you think there is nothing in there you want. You just never know. I never would have clipped the coupons for the Budweiser BBQ sauce. Then Giant decided they wanted to give me $2 for each bottle I purchased. How mad I would have been if I had thrown out those coupons!
And set up a junk email account. I use this account for registering when I want to print coupons online or register for something else.
That’s it, a few easy steps to getting started:
1. get the Sunday paper
2. try to get multiple inserts if you can
3. find a designated space to keep these items
4. set up a junk email account
5. Stay tuned to this blog as I point out all the stackable deals!
