I have a love/hate relationship with coupons. Well…mostly hate. It seems so tedious to cut them out and file them, then most of the time I forget them before heading out to the store. So from time to time I sort through my coupons and toss out the expired ones and cringe thinking of the money I could have saved.
I was going through this ritual a week or so before the end of December when I decided to pull out all the coupons expiring at the end of the year to see if I could use them. I found many for grocery items I regularly bought, some $1 or more off, some for goods that I didn’t need yet but would use soon. I decided this time to shop around the coupons. I ended up saving $12 at Wal-Mart (where we usually but toiletries anyway because they’re cheaper and where I used the $1 off coupons that the grocery store would not double) and about that much again at the grocery store (which doubled coupons under a certain amount). That certainly provided motivation!
I decided that might be the better way to use coupons: instead of trying to deal with them every week and failing, it might be easier to go through them once a month and pull out all the ones expiring within the next month, and shop for those items whether I need them just then or not.
There is a limit to this as we don’t have a lot of storage space. Because of that I still avoid coupons where you have to buy an abundance of one product, and I avoid those requiring a complicated assortment as just taking too much time. But overall this method works much better for me than what I had been doing.
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7 Comments
January 7, 2009 at 9:15 am
This is a good idea, Barbara. I used to create my grocery list and then hunt for matching coupons. It took a lot longer.
I looked at the post on parenting above this one and feel a sense of relief as my parenting days are over.
January 7, 2009 at 10:00 am
I am like you about coupons. For a while, we took the local newspaper just for the coupons. What I found to be true is that if I am buying the store brand I save the money anyway. I use coupons on things like catfood and litter because there are only certain brands that we use. If I see a coupon in a magazine that I can use, I’ll save it and take it the next time I go to the store.
January 7, 2009 at 10:16 am
I’m one of those lazy folks who are too lazy to do anything with coupons…
January 7, 2009 at 1:28 pm
I should try this. I’m not a big fan of coupons simply because I end up spending too much time trying to figure them out. But, this way would help ease that frustration.
Thank you for sharing.
January 7, 2009 at 3:31 pm
I like this plan! I have a love/ hate relationship, too, and have stacks in my kitchen. Ugh! How I hate the sight of those stacks some days!
Thanks for posting this idea! I’ll have to give that a try!
January 7, 2009 at 3:43 pm
This is good! I kind of get in an “all or nothing” mode and feel like a failure when I don’t do the coupon thing all the time. This would be much more do-able for me.
January 8, 2009 at 5:48 pm
I used to be great at the coupon thing. At one time I cut my bill in half. I’m so out of practice and our stores no longer double
It’s worth picking up the habit again, GREAT IDEA!