When I was home for the summer and on maternity leave with "Peter Parker" this past year, I started to experiment a little with couponing. Scanning ads, cutting, clipping, downloading, etc, etc. I was fairly good at it- I once got my grocery bill from $100 to $40- which included name brand formula, diapers and wipes! However, as school started back in August, my coupon clipping, money saving efforts went by the wayside :( I once again simply returned to my shopping by using "the cheapest I could find and quickest way to get in and out of the store" method.
Until this weekend...as Nathan and I sat watching Extreme Couponing on TLC, we thought to ourselves, "Hey! We could do this!". Now, by no means, do I think that we will be THAT extreme with the years worth of products in stockpiles and 9 grocery carts when I go to the store. But you have to admit, they have some mad skills! WOW! One person bought $5,000 worth of groceries for $250!
As we watched, we started to reevaluate the current couponing system. I currently have a wallet sized, accordian envelope in which my coupons are filed in no specific order (simply what makes sense to me). This will be changed to a binder style with baseball card pockets with a table of contents. You can see the Krazy Coupon Lady for more information about this system as I found it on her website after watching her feature on the show. I plan to also use couponmom.com to help me match up which coupons go with which store sales each week for the maximum % saved.
After just a little bit of planning, we decided to put this new idea to a small test. We went to the grocery store shortly after church where I knew there was a sale on ALL laundry detergent. Here, I got a package of Huggies diapers and the laundry detergent for a total of about $10. Not too bad (the diapers were acutally $9.99 regular price), but I bet we can do better.
Once again, I consulted the couponmom.com website and started to sort out which coupons would be expiring and which coupons we would need this next week according to what was going to be on sale . It turns out I had 3 coupons for colgate toothpaste and one for a free salad dressing at our local grocery store-all expiring on 1/16/11! In one final attempt for the evening, I ran to the grocery to put my new skill to practice. I got 3 tubes of Colgate toothpaste and 1 bottle of salad dressing for a total of $1.18! Now, this may not seem like a huge deal for some, I did not get thousands of dollars in groceries for a couple of hundred, but it is an exciting start! In a family that is growing in age and size, any little bit of savings helps! I've also decided that stockpiling some things such as wipes, diapers, health and beauty products may be fairly easy to store (especially if I am paying almost nothing-we can make room) so I will keep you posted on the stockpiling issue. I have listed some websites below that I have found to be helpful (in addition to finding coupons at specific manufacturers' websites). If you have any tips or ideas, please feel free to share-I am very new at this!
Our next venture will be to cut down on eating out. This is a HUGE issue for us, especially on the weekends! For some reason, we become LAZY each weekend (and around pay days) and eating out just seems effortless-and expensive! I try to keep up with some restaurant coupons and I know where you can find kids eat free or cheap deals (I will include a list of links below if you're interested), but our family still seems to go overboard. We are working to put some limits on this and be more responsible in the area of eating out. Ideas, tips, etc are welcome :)
Coupon Websites:
couponmom.com
The Krazy Coupon Lady
Kroger (upload coupons to your card)
Shortcuts
Coupons.com
cellfire.com
CouponNerdz
Restaurant Deals:
Restaurant.com
Kids Meal Deals
Groupon
hey kristen, love the blog, how fun! I was a coupon nut when we lived in upstate NY, and Coupon Mom was my constant reference on Sunday morning. You should also check out Hip 2 Save and Money Saving Mom, I outfitted myself and all my family with a year's supply of toothpaste, makeup, shampoo etc by shopping at CVS!! It was truly ridiculous how cheaply you can buy things by combining sales with coupons with loyalty programs! Good luck!!
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