Frugal Living #3

In my Frugal Living #2 post, I talked about where to find coupons. Now I'm going to talk about how to USE those coupons for best savings.

Considering joining a coupon group. You can do a search for them on yahoo groups. I co-own one called OurCouponCafe. We have coupon trains. The idea is that one person (the conductor) starts an envelope of coupons and sends to passenger #1. P#1 takes out what they want and replaces them with coupons they don't want and sends to passenger #2. P#2 does the same, and so on. There's a little more to it than that - have to check expiration dates, not send "junk", etc, but that's the basic idea. So, you can get more of the coupons for items you use.

When the items you use all the time go on sale, you stock up. Sale cycles usually run about every 8-12 weeks. So, say, for example, you use about 1 jar of may per month. Mayo goes on sale BOGO (buy one get one free). You would want to buy at least 4 jars, using 4 coupons (yes most stores will let you use coupons on the "free" item), to last you until the next sale. Obviously some items have exp dates so you don't want to overstock things that will go bad. But, I know of people who bought 40 packages of toilet paper when it went on a 10 for $10 sale and they had 40 coupons for $1 off. That's a whole lot of free toilet paper!

By shopping in this manner, I rarely ever have to pay full price for anything. I've actually had shopping trips where I ended up being paid to take the groceries (after counting in mystery shopping income from it). It's rare, but it CAN happen.

Do you use coupons? If so, how much do you save per month? You should track it to show yourself how it is worth it! Why throw money away? I feel like coupons are money and throwing them away is being wasteful.