The Couponing System I Personally Use
Posted on | August 1, 2009 | No Comments
I would like to discuss couponing strategies and the couponing system that I personally use to save a lot of money before I write about the food experiment I will be conducting. This ties in with my recent post on Cutting Down Your Grocery Bill by Playing the Grocery Game (the hyperlink is too long, please see archived posts). If you have read this article, you will know that you do not need to coupon in order to save a lot of money at the grocery store. However, couponing will save you even more money at the store on top of the grocery game strategy, so I personally choose to use it.
At first glance, couponing probably seems intimidating, time consuming, and perhaps costly because of needing to purchase a Sunday paper each week. Maybe right now you try to coupon, but only seem to save $0.75 or $1.25 off of each of your grocery bills and feel that this is not enough to warrant your time and energy. I completely agree! But what if you started to save $20.00 off your grocery bills? $40? $50? Suddenly it seems like a great way save money.
The way you can do this is by saving all of your coupons until you find a sale that you can then pair a coupon with. This probably sounds daunting, but thanks to some great blogs and an easy coupon system, it’s really quite simple.
As I discussed earlier, grocery stores run on a 10 or 12-week grocery sales cycle. Sometimes these sales line up with the coupons that come out in that week’s Sunday paper (specifically, in the CVS sales flyer you will see a little circle on a product that is being promoted that says a coupon is in this week’s Sunday paper. Grocery stores rarely do this). However, most of the time the coupon for a product that is on sale cannot be found in that particular week’s coupon circulars. Even if you organize your coupons by product type, you may still miss out on using coupons because your coupons become cluttered, or you have too many of them and cannot properly sort through them. Imagine how much potential savings you may be losing due to throwing away last week’s or last month’s coupon circulars, or simply by not knowing that a coupon is out there for a particular item!
Here is a simple way to coupon effectively so that you can start to see lots of savings from coupons in less than one hour a week:
1. Start by buying a Sunday paper every Sunday, and perhaps two. Here is a site where you can get a discount on home delivery of your area’s Sunday paper. Also, you may have a neighbor who does not coupon and would be willing to share them with you.
2. Purchase about ten two-pocket folders. Right now there are lots of sales going on for back to school at places such as Staples, Office Depot, CVS, etc., and you should be able to get these folders for $0.05 each or less!
3. Each week, take the smartsource, vlassis, and redplum coupon circulars in the Sunday paper and put them in a folder pocket. Write the date of the newspaper on both the outside of the folder as well as the coupon circulars themselves. Please note that some Sundays there is only a smartsource, or a redplum, or maybe all three.
4. Create a grocery list each week, or every other week (depending on how often you shop), with as many sales items from that week’s sales circular as possible.
5. Go to: www.couponmom.com, and search her free Grocery Coupon Database on the lefthand side of her blog (I think you must register as a member for free first). This database logs in all currently active coupons around the country, and you can search by product. The search results will show you if there is a coupon, whether or not it was in a smartsource, redplum, or vlassis circular, and what date newspaper it came out in (which is why you need to keep the dates on those folders and circulars!).
6. Go to your coupon folder library, find the coupon by date and circular, clip, and go to the store!
Not only will you save money with this system, but you will also save a lot of time because you no longer need to clip each coupon and categorize them. Also, this system allows you to follow many online blogs who write about weekly deals and pair together the sales circulars with particular coupons from particular dates.
As your coupons age and expire (which is normally when you run out of folders to fill), get rid of the older coupons, cross out the dates on the outside of the folder with a sharpie marker, and reuse the folder. Check out this website where you can find an address of a military base to donate the expired coupons to. Military families can use expired coupons for up to six months on base (please note, you do need to clip each of the coupons, and categorize them into two plastic bags: one for food and one for non-food).
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Tags: Coupon System > Coupons > Saving Money
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