Much to my room mate's chagrin, I've picked up a new hobby... couponing. I've tried couponing years ago, but I gave up on it because I couldn't keep track of the coupons, their expiration dates and I usually left my coupons at home forgetting to bring them with me when I went shopping. It didn't seem to me that the effort was worth the minimal savings, plus I was buying items that we didn't use or need just because I had found a coupon.
So then I spent a few days researching the whole concept of couponing, how and why it works, and how to best apply coupons to save money. I've joined a great website, PracticalSaver.com, and have used it to learn about couponing.
How coupons work and how to get the best deals
- The main idea is to amass a collection of coupons, but time their use for when stores place items you usually buy on extreme sales. Don't just use the coupon the first week you get it. Yes, you can use them to save a few cents here and there, but the major savings (75 - 80 - 90 - 100% or more off) comes when you amass your coupons and then use them at the proper time.
- By combining the use of manufacturers' coupons, store coupons, store doubling/tripling coupon value, and weekly sales, you can combine these savings and get really low prices, possibly even for free.
- Nationwide, there are three main coupon sources. They are coupon inserts that come in the local Sunday paper. They come from three sources: Smart Source (weekly), Red Plum (weekly) and Proctor & Gamble (first Sunday of month). The cash cow here is to get as many copies of these inserts so that, when the sale of your desired item(s) happens, you have many coupons that can be redeemed in combination with store coupons plus loyalty card savings.
- There are sites where you can print coupons (the ones I am using now are coupons.com and coupontom.com but there are many others). You can trade/swap with family and friends. Then there are extreme couponers that will go on ebay and buy a bunch of coupons. I've also watched YouTube videos of folks dumpster-diving to find coupons.
- To save the time, energy and effort of finding local sales that correspond to a recently printed coupon, many couponers utilize web sites that do this research for you. They will print lists every week (I think the universal sale ad publication day is Wednesday morning) and then note which ones also have coupons. So, let's say your store has a major sale on Tide Laundry Detergent 28 loads marked down to 2.99/each. The web site will indicate this is a great deal, and then say something like "5/8 SS" which means there is a coupon in the Supersaver insert that came out 5/8 (in case you aren't continuously clipping -- many couponers keep these inserts intact and clip only when the sale happens). This is the key to cashing in with coupons. You'd go find that coupon, which might have that item/size on sale for 2.00 off. You go to your store, get that item (maybe you're getting an even better deal via your loyalty card) then you give them the coupon and get that jug of Tide for 99 cents that usually cost you 5.99. Sweet. I personally use PracticalSaver.com because the owner of the site, Kara Rozendaal, lives in my area and covers Fry's Grocery along with the other major grocery stores I know.
- Obviously, the Time Suck here is that you will need a system so you can find your coupons without tearing your hair out every week. Based on the hundreds of YouTube video's, there are two main camps: folks that clip as the coupons come in versus those that just save the inserts organized so they can find it and then clip it.
- Then among the folks that clip as we go, you need a binder or box of some kind to keep track of the coupons.
- Then you need a system to create your shopping list, coordinating it with the weekly ads from your store and the coupons you have.
- Then you need a system to weed out expired coupons.
Stockpiling
- This is where our natural tendency to hoard can become a problem. The point here is that you are buying many/most of the items you usually use but only when they go on a major sale. These sale items rotate (anywhere from every 2 to 6 months). So the extreme couponers are not going to buy anything until it goes on a major sale. So they don't buy Tide by the bottle, they amass coupons and, on the day the Tide goes on sale, they go get 4-10 jugs for 2 bucks. That's the key.
- You will need space to store and organize your stockpile of items.
- There are extreme couponers out there that have stockpiled ridiculous amounts of stuff - enough razors to shave you, your wife, your kids and your three Irish Setters every day for the next 200 years, that sort of thing. I personally think this is going to far but that's what some of them are doing.
What I do:
- I plan to get most of my coupons from the three inserts in the Sunday paper, and then print coupons from coupons.com and coupontom.com (the second one is where I go to find a coupon for a specific item, and it also has a nice feature that identifies newly added coupons). I guess I'll keep the inserts around (yes with stuff clipped out of them), but I'm thinking I don't want to buy stuff we don't use, so I might stop this later.
- I number my coupons from 1 to 1000 in no particular order, and store them in a coupon accordion file in numerical order.
- When I get to 1000, I plan to start over at 1 and toss out the coupons 1-100, thus I should only be keeping coupons for about 3 months.
- I keep a spreadsheet in Google Docs that has the item number along with the item name and limitations so that I have a list of all the coupons. I have a column that identifies major groups (meats, bread, spice/condiments, cleaning, toilietries, etc.) By using the sort functions, I can get this list in groups and subgroups so I can find coupons very quickly.
- I also record on the sheet coupons I have applied to my loyalty card via the store's web site. I shop at Fry's Grocery (part of Krogers) and I can "clip" coupons and the coupon is automatically applied when it's scanned at checkout.
- Every week, I look through the weekly ad for my grocery store and enter those sale items we usually use into my sheet. When I sort, I can see which sale items match coupons I have. If I'm going to use the coupon(s), I have the coupon number so I can pull out the coupon(s) and bring them with me to the store when I go shopping.
- For non-sale items we need, I use the sorted list and circle items we need. I may use the coupon but I may not so that I can use the coupon for when the major sales happen, but if the coupon is about to expire, I am going to use it then. Here's a screen shot of my sheet (click on the image to view larger):
When planning my shopping, I would find a sale item ("sale" in first column) with a good coupon(s) (a number in column 1). The items with "FC" in column 1 are coupons I got from Fry's web site. Since they would be applied before any manufacturer's coupon, if I had both an FC and a manufacturer's coupon and I wanted to use the manufacturer's coupon, I'd have to go and remove that electronic coupon from my card before I got to Fry's. So when I sorted my list, after updating with this week's sales, I see that Ketchup is on sale and I have a coupon, and we need it.
For me, using this spreadsheet is the way to go, because I am good with computers and I am very comfortable with how Google spreadsheets work. The advantage for me is that I can print this list, or I can view it on my cell phone, my Kindle, or any other internet-capable device. If I didn't like computers, I'd have to go with a binder, or a box with tabs, but then I'd have to sort and organize and purging would be more difficult. - As I become more experienced, I'll try to save up my coupons and only use them on major sales, but since I'm just starting out (with very few coupons -- about 50 for the first week), I'm spending more time accumulating coupons and organizing my sheet.
My First Week of Couponing: I've only just started, but we went shopping this morning and, with the information I've learned plus the few coupons I have so far, we lowered our grocery bill from $80.65 to 41.25. Not bad, but I am pretty sure my numbers will improve as I amass more coupons and build enough of a stockpile to buy only at major sales.
Thanks to Kara at Practicalsaver.com , for all of the information on her website and Youtube video, upon which most of my couponing stragegy is based!
Wow is this a for you? Seems very time intensive but cool! We used to do coupons but found now we mostly shop at costco and wholefoods
Posted by: Karen | May 29, 2012 at 10:11 AM