Photo by MissMessie
It has been a long time since I have thought about coupons. Is that hypocritical of me to say? Here I am, posting about it, and signed up to teach classes, and I haven’t used a coupon almost ALL Summer long. It feels hypocritical to me.
But I’ll tell you why it’s not. I worked from December of last year until about June of this year…7 months, at stockpiling. I stockpiled laundry soap, toiletry items, cereal, bread, and much, much more. I literally had so much stuff in my house (not in a hording kind of way, but in a being prepared kind of way) that I had the ABILITY to take a couple months off. On the whole, the only thing that we bought over the Summer as far as food goes, was fruit, veggies and meat. We just didn’t need much else. And you know what this did? It freed up money in our budget for being able to go on a 8 day long family vacation, which we have never done before AND go on a family camping trip- which in and of itself, camping is not real expensive…but we’ve never been camping with our entire family before, and we needed a “lodge” sized tent (seriously, that was the name of the tent we picked- “XL Vacation Lodge or something like that) and some other camping equipment…so we had to spend some money to be able to do it.
And let me just tell you…when you are an extreme couponer…sometimes you just need a break. And it’s okay to take one.
However, September finally came around, and I found that we were running out of cereal…which is shocking when I think of how much cereal I had bought over the last months. And I find myself staring in the face of teaching a class on how to coupon in mid-September as well as being a Breakout Speaker for the Selah Women’s Conference at George Fox University, on September 25th. I think it’s time to get my game face back on and get back into the swing of things.
With all that said, I thought that I could start by reviewing all my previous posts on couponing, which I did…and found more typos that I will admit to and I apologize profusely for that. I hate typos. But I’m over it. They’re fixed and everyone makes typos now and again, right? Right?
Moving on…today we’re going to talk about how to work the system of coupons…what the strategies are and how to get the most mileage out of those little, tiny pieces of paper. But first if you haven’t read the first parts, here are some links: #1, #2, #3, and #4. I promise there will be, well, less typos. No promises of perfection here…ever.
The biggest mistake that people make when thinking about using coupons is that you clip them and then take them to the store and just use them. No. No. No. No. That is not going to save you money, or be a good use of your time. If you want to get the most bang for your buck, you must be strategic with your coupon usage. You must, at the very least, wait for a SALE. If you have a coupon for $1 off Tide laundry soap for example, and you go to the store to purchase Tide, you will likely be paying $9-10 full price, minus the $1 for the coupon. This means that you are still paying $8-9 for Tide laundry soap. And that is WAY too much! You might feel good about saving yourself $1, but the question is, was it worth the time and effort to clip that coupon, organize it and remember to bring it to the store in order to save $1. I would say no. (At least not for me)
However, if you wait until Tide laundry soap goes on sale for $6, and THEN use your coupon for $1 off…you’ve just saved yourself about 50% off full retail price, just by waiting for a sale. Moral of the story? WAIT FOR A SALE!
One step above waiting for a sale is this: Use a manufacturer coupon, AND a store coupon on top of a sale. Remember in an earlier post when I told you about stacking? You can use a store coupon and a manufacturer coupon together on one item. You can do this even when the store is having a sale. In the above example, let’s say the store is having a sale on Tide for $6. If the store also happens to have a store coupon for $1 off Tide, you can use the sale to get the Tide for $6, plus $1 off for the store coupon PLUS $1 off for the manufacturer coupon. Which means that you are getting the Tide for $4 instead of $10. That is a 60% savings. But wait, it gets better.
Remember when we talked about Catalina coupons? So often, store sales, store coupons, manufacturer coupons and store promos go all together…and this is what we call “the perfect storm”. In the last example, we just managed to save 60% off of our Tide. But let’s add to that. Let’s say that there is a Catalina promo that is going on- when you buy a bottle of Tide, you get a Catalina coupon for $2 off your next purchase. So, you would use the sale price of $6, use both coupons, to take off $2 more…you would then pay $4 for your Tide, and then with your receipt, you would get a $2 off coupon. You just got $2 back for buying Tide, so essentially, you just paid $2 for a bottle of Tide laundry soap. And THAT is how you do it. That, my friends, is an 80% savings and THAT is when you want to stockpile that item. In order to do that, you need, of course lots of coupons. Which you can “buy” on Ebay or other coupon clipping services…and then you would do that same transaction over and over until you had the amount of Tide that you wanted. On your next transaction, you would do all of the above, but add your Catalina coupon to your stack of coupons and then you’re only paying $2 out of pocket for your Tide AND getting another Catalina coupon. And you can go do it again. And again.
Another quick strategy to keep in mind are rebates. There are very often rebates out on products…Olay is one I see a lot. They are always a little different, but essentially you have to make a purchase on a specific product and/or spend a specific amount of money on something. Then you save your receipt, fill out the form and mail it in and they will give you a check back in the mail. I’m sure that we’re all fairly familiar with rebates. But the beauty of using rebates in addition to some of the strategies outlined above is that often when combined with coupons and sales, adding a rebate check on to it, gets you close to all your money back you paid out of pocket, making your purchases free. Or in lots of cases, you get MORE money back than what you paid, which means that you just earned money buying products. And who wouldn’t like that?
At this point, you’re probably wondering how you figure out how to combine a sale with a coupon, etc…it’s a lot to keep track of. I highly recommend finding some good coupon blogs/websites that will do this work for you. My favorites are:
www.frugallivingnw.com
www.thekrazycouponlady.com
www.fabulouslyfrugal.com
They each are similar in a lot of ways, but also differ. There are thousands of coupon blogs out there, but those are what I would recommend starting with!
Thoroughly confused yet? Have questions? Leave me a comment and I’ll do my best to either answer in the comment section or address it in another post.
‘No. No. No. No.’ Couldn’t agree more! hehe!
I was just sitting down to do my Albertson’s Doublers’ scenario when I saw your post.
I took all of July off too. Let me tell you, though, our budget didn’t like it when I did. I don’t have nearly the stockpile that you do.
So when you say that when you get a CAT coupon you can “do it again and again” you are actually saying that you will go through the check out, buy your Tide, and then go back to the shelf and pick up another tide and go through the check out again, all in the same trip to the store so you can buy your Tide for 2 dollars per bottle?
Yep! Generally the stores don’t care how many times you go through the line. It takes some time, but it’s totally worth it!