Couponing

Last night (Friday), Gretch and I went to one of our local County Market grocery stores with two other couples with whom we are good friends to attend a seminar on couponing. Now, to some of the older readers of our blog, this probably sounds like a silly thing to do on a Friday night. After all, what is there to learn about coupons?

I remember a time in my life when my sister and I would sit with our mum on the living room floor, each armed with a pair of scissors, and spent an hour or so clipping coupons. This was a labour-intensive task because, with several paper carriers in the family, we had access to many newspapers every day, including the coupon-laden Sunday edition. So clipping coupons was a big deal. And yet, I really don't have many recollections of seeing Mum use the coupons when we went shopping (and we did go shopping with her quite often). It may have been because we seemed to do a large bulk of our grocery shopping at either Sam's Club or Aldi, neither of which are particularly coupon-friendly establishments.

Still, we went to the seminar because we are all trying to be more savvy with our shopping, especially when it comes to groceries. When Gretch and I first married, we spent roughly $80-100 a month on groceries. Our bishop was shocked when we told him this, but, at the same time, our diet consisted of cereal and milk for breakfast, Gretch didn't eat lunch and I just had peanut butter & jam sandwiches, and dinner was often some variation of pasta with sauce. Over the past few months, though, we have made a concerted effort to increase the healthfulness of our eating habits. So this means more variety, fresh fruits and veggies, etc. And so our grocery bills have gone up considerably.

Which is why we are trying to find ways to save money and still eat nutritious food. Hence the reason we attended a seminar on wisely using coupons. It was interesting. I don't know that any of the content was new to me, but having it all presented together definitely helped it all make sense. Part of the process, though, is knowing what things cost in the first place. To this end, Gretch decided we needed to make a massive database of all the consumables that we regularly purchase of the course of the year. In order to find the best prices, we are going to be comparing the costs for all of these many items at County Market, Aldi, Sam's Club, Wal-Mart, Meijer, Schnuck's, Target, and even Kroger (even though we don't have one close to us. Yes, we are going to spend a lot of time there when we are in Washington one of these days. But Kroget is last on the list.)

Taking advantage of Google Documents, we are going to be sharing this database with our friends so that we can all know what to expect. We spent a couple of hours at County Market today wandering the aisles, finding the best prices, and recording them. After I got home this evening, I put them into the document. There are still many items we need to locate. It was fun. I may do more on my own on Monday, now that I am officially a non-working bum until I find a summer job. We are also going to be trying to snag coupons from Gretch's parents, since they reportedly don't use them often. Otherwise we'll have to subscribe to the Sunday paper.

Oh, and we also bought a few grocery items, using some coupons we had received last night. Nothing spectacular, but we did save about 35% by finding items on sale and using them. Noah and Cherry reported saved a little over 50% today. I haven't talked to Dan and Kristie to see what their results were. Feel free to let us know of any secrets you use to help save money by clipping coupons and finding deals!

Comments

Reger Rocks said…
Don't buy anything you wouldn't normally buy even if it is on sale and you have a coupon. You haven't saved money even if you paid a dime for it. You save money by only buying what you normally would shop for. Leave the extras (basically junk food) out and save money that way.
That's why we are making a list of items we regularly buy, as well as grocery shopping lists. As tempting as it is to stock up on things because they are a good sale, we only buy the things we know we a) will use and b) want to use.

And we will only buy one "treat" item when we shop because, while we want to be frugal, we don't feel the need to live on subsistence only.

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