by Claire
I really enjoyed my Friday night fun. I learned a lot about couponing and got some tips on meal planning too. I’m feeling pretty good about my already existing meal planning habits. We are accustomed to eating at home so it is good that we haven’t had to make major changes there. Eating out for 5 or 6 is a crazy expense.
I’m sitting at my dining room table right now with the coupon circulars spread about. There’s a whole world out there on this couponing thing! Wow! I had no idea! As expected, we learned that we live in a tough market given the market control held by one giant, but I like what I hear about CVS, Walgreens and Target. www.coupondad.net has a great “CVS 101” and “Walgreens 101” bit that I found tremendously helpful. It can be very intimidating so my goal is to just start with health and beauty items. If I can save on soap, shampoo, toothpaste, toothbrushes, dental floss and hair color…oh and batteries…that’s a great place to start. I can’t seem to get a handle on stockpiling groceries yet but I’m open to it…especially pasta. Please don’t tell me to make my own pasta. I will not make my own pasta–although I AM often very taken by all of that fun and expensive pasta making stuff when I visit the high end culinary stores. “Culinary.” Even using that word makes me chuckle. You know…the Williams-Sonoma, Sur le table…oh my goodness I love going in those stores. I don’t buy anything mind you but the idea of having all those kitchen gadgets is so fun! But…I digress…
Anyway…I’ll report back on my success on this baby step…and all the other baby steps. I’m feeling a little bit like I have all of these great ideas but I haven’t taken a whole lot of ACTION.
Born and raised in Texas. I’ve at least driven through every state in the US courtesy of a roadtrip loving Dad.
I’m single with two children and a good parenting relationship with their father.
I am a “life is just half full of funny” kinda gal. Humor is my saving grace and I am thankful for it every single day. I have a strong Catholic faith and am thankful for that foundation.
I read a lot for a living but still enjoy a good book. I love biographies but in recent years have found the need for fun fictional books–sadly, for a long time I just didn’t enjoy fiction!
I love live theatre of any kind–from local productions to Broadway.
I love to scrapbook and pride myself in my kids’ albums.
I love being a mom but also love my career. I’m blessed to have found a balance allowing me to be at everything my kids need and want me to be at–while also having a career.
Favorite Quotes: Well behaved women rarely make history.
Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out. -James Bryant Conant
Who’d have thought you would get a big laugh from me? pasta making = ugh! My bother-in-law gave us a pasta maker one year at Christmas. We were all enthusiasm and got right down to it. There the kitchen was–broom and mop handles over chairs–strands of pasta drooping everywhere and the two cats and dog shut away
Well it tasted no better than good quality bought and the nuisance of making it…After a couple of years we took the gadget to the Salvation Army and have never regretted it.
Don’t even care for store bought fresh pasta (“Fresh” I wonder? It tends to be floury and squashy and no treat–we want it al dente)
have a very good week.
P.S. The one thing I’ve ever bought (on sale) at a fancy kitchen store was a bamboo cutting board and I have to say–8 years on it is still perfect and unscratched; a really good buy.
I’m a huge fans of coupons, but I think the couponing culture is out of control and I certainly don’t believe in “stockpiling.” Use coupons as much as you can for a reasonable amount of stuff, but please don’t “stockpile” food or toiletries. Some couponers have so much crap, there’s no way they can use it all – food or toiletries – before it expires. Others are going to die with giant stockpiles that will just get thrown in a landfill.
Also, while it’s always good to learn to save money any way possible, it strikes me that your financial issues are in the bigger areas of your spending. Couponing is necessary for some people who live at the margins in terms of their income. Your household income is massive – certainly in the top 5% of US households. And yet your debt is still massive. I’m guessing that your spending is out of control in areas of life much larger than groceries.
One other thought…extreme couponers seem to be killing themselves with the processed, unhealthy food they so proudly stock up on. I wouldn’t consider getting 20 boxes of sugary cereal for a few cents each a bargain – especially not when I consider how it’s killing my children.
Instead, I save tons of money on groceries by eating simple, healthy whole foods. Ever notice that there aren’t many coupons for the produce and the bulk aisles? You’ll spend less there anyway and don’t have to go crazy with couponing. I mainly buy fresh, in-season, on-sale fruits and vegetables and whole grains, beans and other items from the bulk section. No need to coupon, very cheap, and healthy.
I completely relate to your Williams Sonoma/ Sur la Table fun. Because we’re both super frugal and obsessed with cooking, my best friend and I go on Friday night dates, which entail going to a thrift store for some fun inexpensive shopping, heading over to the fancy cooking stores where we play the “if I was rich and could afford it” game where we talk about everything in the store we would like to buy and what we’d do with it, and then we head to the bookstore where we browse cookbooks and magazines for the next week’s meal planning ideas. Sometimes we throw drinks and appetizers into the mix, but not regularly. I highly recommend this as a fun, inexpensive girls night out:)
I couldn’t be bothered to make my own pasta either. There’s some money saving strategies that simply take up too much time to be worthwhile.
I noticed a comment above was against stockpiling food, but personally I think it is ok to do in moderation. If you’d buy it regularly anyway and use it before it goes bad, what’s the harm? It would definitely be useful in an emergency and saves time in the long run.
Margot does make a good point about couponing only being a small savings. If you make a lot of money, but have debt problems, you need to really examine the larger spending to see where much bigger cuts could be made.
Glad it went well! Here in Canada I like to use the blog Mrsjanuary.com. She gives a breakdown of all the flyer specials each week and a heads up of all the good coupons etc.
Marianne: Thanks for the link! My eyes normally glaze over coupon/sale posts because the deals are so dramatically different here in Canada.
I do live as close to the border as I do to the nearest city, so I do a border run about 4x per year, mainly to stock up on chicken and cream cheese, both insanely cheaper than in my area of the country. Chicken is about 1/3 the cost and cream cheese is half.
I don’t use a lot of cream cheese so only save about $5 per year. The chicken savings aren’t a lot either (about $50) but there are only two of us and we eat out a lot due to our travels.
It is important to figure out annual savings vs the time spent scavenging for deals. As Margot says, get the big spending under control.
For me, that was making the commitment to not buy new (I joined The Compact.) To my surprise, I saved not only in purchases, but in gas since I wasn’t driving to the store as often. We have never had non-mortgage debt (only our first car was financed, the rest we paid cash) so I thought our spending was completely for needs, not wants. Boy was I wrong! We took the 5 figure savings from the first year and bought a ground source heat pump which has reduced our monthly costs on an on-going basis. All because I stopped buying ‘little’ things new.
I still have no idea how I was managing to spend 5 figures a year on ‘stuff’ that I didn’t need. But I was.
My mom did this religiously for years. Me, I can’t get into the coupon thing. I have a neighbor who has them in envelopes and all. I just look for the decent sales and go from there if its something I usually get.
Couponing might be a “small” savings, but that’s how you’re going to get to where you need to be. You may not be able to cut out a big chunk of spending, but all those little chunks will add up! As far as stockpiling, you don’t need to go to extremes like the people on TV, but if you can have 10 or 12 bottles of shampoo, for example, you won’t have to buy them at full price ever, or have to run out for a bottle of shampoo and end up buying a bunch of other stuff. Don’t get discouraged or give up on couponing. There is a learning curve, but stick with it and it will pay off! 🙂
Personally, whenever I try to follow some of those coupon routines, I fail. I never seem to be able to find the right stuff to qualify or I mess up somehow and just can’t make it work. I end up spending more than I would have if I just stuck to my list and bought what I needed on sale. For me, not worth it. I’m sure it’s one of those things that you just have to keep practicing and you’ll get better but again, not worth it to me. Maybe you’ll have better luck.
The class sounds like fun! Do you have a store like Aldis around? I love Aldis! They have got some of the best produce around!!!
I don’t clip coupons, but my grocery stores have discount cards. When they put an item on sale, if you have the discount card you get the sale price. I’ll try to buy items I use regularly when they’re on sale, and sometimes I can save as much as 10% off the grocery bill.
But, I also live by myself. If I had more mouths to feed I might pay more attention to coupons. When I still lived at home Mom used to clip coupons for products she used, and often times the coupons would come out the same week the grocery store was running a sale. Also, at the time, the grocery store doubled coupons. After a while we stopped getting the 75 cent coupons because of the doubling, but when I went off to college I was in a part of the country that didn’t double coupons, so they had the larger face value coupons. I would clip those and mail them to Mom. We engaged in coupon arbitrage!
Good luck! I am a couponer—what fun it is!
Example-I went to Target over the weekend to take advantage of their Playtex deal as well as the Scrubbing Bubbles deal.
Playtex-Buy 3 at $6.00 get a $5 Gift Card
Scrubbing Bubbles–buy 1 at $9.40 get a $5 Gift Card.
Also had Playtex BOGO-which of course I used and had $3/1 Scrubbing Bubbles-Had multiple transactions so that I could use the gift cards as I went and my total out of pocket was somewhere around $20. I posted a picture on my Facebood–awesomeness!!!!!
Don’t forget that there are tons of mail in rebate offers-so don’t be afraid to do some searchs and print!
Totally Target is wonderful for Target deals. I’ve been finding that for me, the better deals for tolietries have been there over the last year. Lately, I’ve noticed better deals there for food, too. For example, 2 weeks ago Target has pasta on sale for $1.00 a box. Some boxes were 12 oz. and some were 16 oz. I only get the ones that are 16 oz. Then, on their website, they had 2 coupons; one for $1 off 4 boxes of pasta, and one for $1 off 3 boxes of pasta.
My family eats almost 2 pounds of pasta at a meal now (there are 8 of us). This made for some really inexpensive pasta.
The other thing they had was $1 off 4 bags of frozen vegetables. Their frozen vegetables are all 16 oz. (other brands are usualy only 12 or 10 oz. bags). They had broccoli for .97 a bag (regular price) and other veegtables on sale for .97 a bag. .72 a pound for broccoli is a GREAT price where I live and it is my children’s favorite vegetable. My family eats the whole bag at dinner.
In general, I mostly use coupons for tolietries, since I buy in bulk amounts (25 pounds at a time on things like beans, oats, flour; 50 pounds for rice, etc.). It saves us a lot of money; I can easily have $20 worth of coupons for Target each time I go. Target’s toliet paper seems to be the cheapest we’ve found (we calculate by the length of the roll) and they often have coupons for it on their website as well.
Groceries are one of the places where people can easily overspend. It’s also one of the easiet place to cut. My family eats for .40 per person per day ($3 for 8 of us for 3 meals plus a snack). Feeding my family for $100 a month really helps keep our expenses down. (And for the record, I don’t buy cold cereal). Toilitries are also an important place to cut, and one that can make a huge difference.
I LOVE this website! Someone referred me to it a few weeks back but after your comment I went back to really check things out. Thanks for the reminder!