Extreme Couponing

If you need motivation to "coupon", you need to watch "Extreme Couponing" on TLC, Saturday, January 15 at 6:00 pm. (You're welcome, TLC)

Seriously, it's amazing.

I've been couponing for a few months now. I have a small, expandable folder divided by month. Every week, I acquire two Sunday newspapers and cut all of the coupons out. I keep what I will use and file the coupons by expiration date, then I pass the rest around to friends and to my mom. Our budget for the grocery is $120 every two weeks. On Friday, before shopping, I spend a few hours organizing coupons and writing out the grocery list. I plan two weeks of meals (about 6-8 meals because Chandler works late some nights which become leftover nights) and we head to the store on pay day to get it out of the way.

Initially, I was happy to save 10 or 20 dollars, but once I got into the flow of couponing, I began saving 50 to 60 dollars, keeping us spot on with our budget.

Well, the holidays came and we all got sick and I just got lazy; my coupon stash dwindled and I didn't really care to put the effort into it. I didn't even plan the dinner menu.

Last Friday, we took our bi-weekly grocery shopping trip. I had noticed in the paper that Kroger was having a "Buy 4 items, save $4" type sale and I decided to capitalize on it. When we left the store, we had spent $138, mostly on household items and with very little food. I was STRESSED to the max, to say the least; we had no food, no money in the budget, and I would have to go to the store again this week to actually buy food.

This past Tuesday evening, Chandler and I were channel surfing and came across "Extreme Couponing" on TLC. For the whole hour, my jaw sat on the floor. These people were saving OVER HUNDREDS of dollars at the grocery!! Their initial total would be over $1,000 and with their coupons and deal hunting, they were spending pocket change. I'm not kidding. That's the closest I've ever come to having a heart attack.

That night, I laid in bed forever thinking of my strategy for being an extreme coupon-er. The very next day, yesterday, to be exact, Chandler bought me a 3-ring binger (green!) and some clear, baseball card binder pages. We signed up to receive two Sunday newspapers a week and I will rustle up a few others each week. I organized my binder by the layout of the Kroger on Boston Road and started organizing!

We will continue to keep our bi-weekly grocery bill at $120; however, instead of shopping bi-weekly, I will shop once a week, that way, I can take advantage of Kroger's WEEKLY deals and plan my meals based on the sales.

Two valuable pieces of information that I learned about couponing... 1. Kroger automatically doubles any coupon up to $.50, so a $.50 coupon is really worth $1.00. Ey? Ey?? Pretty sweet. And 2. I can use a coupon for each of the same item. For example, Kroger is famous for their 10/$10 sales, making each item $1. If hand soap happens to be part of the 10/$10 sale that week, I can use 10 $.50 coupons, which double!, and get 10 hand soaps for free. Why would I ever need 10 hand soaps at one time, you ask? The extreme coupon-ers call it "stockpiling". I'll have extra and shoot, if it's free, why not?!?

Go ahead, you can think I'm a nerd or weird, but when you start saving hundreds of dollars because of coupons, you'll thank me.