Thu 29 Jan 2009
How Do You Save Money With Coupons?
Posted by RichSlick under Excuses
[5] Comments
So I’m looking into the whole “frugal” lifestyle now that I’m unemployed. On Sunday I bought the newspaper and browsed through all the coupons to “save” a whole bunch of money when I went grocery shopping. As I flipped through the 30 or so pages of the coupon booklets I found ONE single coupon I could use.
Most of the coupons were for pet food (I have no pets), junk food (I don’t buy junk food), credit card fliers, variety of deodorizing products or plugins and other items I have little or no use for as an unemployed person.
So perhaps I missed something but I thought clipping coupons was suppose to save a great deal of money? How? Is there a secret stash of coupons that I’m missing? I would have been better off spending the hour I used up looking at the coupons in detail doing something else like reading the new Project Management Standard v4 book that just came out a month ago.
The single coupon I cut was for $1.00 off of two boxes of Post cereal. The cereal in question was indeed junk food but my kids really like it so I bought it anyway. Oh well, I guess I’ll take that $1 and buy a lottery ticket with it. 
January 29th, 2009 at 11:51 am
I guess it depends. I have, in the past, clipped coupons. Pretty much for the same reason you did; I wanted to see if it was worth the time.
I even did the whole “price-matching” thing at various stores. Once I got a $60 grocery purchase down to about $30, but that involved taking all my coupons to one particular store that accepted competitors coupons, and then spending about 10 minutes at the register while the cashier hand-entered in every coupon. The long line of people behind me didn’t appreciate it, and saving $30 wasn’t worth the awkward situation.
For some things coupons can save quite a bit. As you noticed, pet food is a big one. Cereal is another. Beyond that, most of the coupons seem to be for name-brand prepared stuff. And I can usually get the same food for less money than the coupons, at the local “ghetto” grocery stores. (Winco and Grocery Outlet in the Northwest).
January 29th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
I’d agree with your assessment that in a lot of cases coupons aren’t huge money savers for food items. Food items that offer coupons are often junk or processed foods, while it is near impossible to find coupons on the staples you really need. There are a few exceptions, but for the most part I don’t bother with coupons for groceries.
I would recommend you check out the deals at Walgreens and CVS. I talk about it some on my blog, but both stores offer items that are effectively free after their promotions. The items vary some but are usually things like shampoo, toothpaste, and cosmetics. To give you an idea, I haven’t paid for toothpaste, toothbrushes, shampoo, conditioner, or body wash in years, and still have a good sized stockpile for the future, perfect for periods of unemployment like I had for several months last year.
CVS has what they call “ExtraBucks”, where if you buy a certain item it generates an ExtraBucks coupon for so much off your next purchase or almost anything in the store. They frequently offer items that give you ExtraBucks for the full purchase price, which make it like getting the item free. They also put out store coupons as well that you can print online and redeem in-store to make deals even sweeter.
Walgreens has a rebate program called Easy Saver Rebates where anywhere from 1-10 products are offered for free after the rebate each month, and you can even submit the rebates online without having to send in receipts or UPCs. They’ll even give you a 10% bonus if you take your rebate on a Walgreens gift card, which effectively covers your sales tax as well. They also have a program like CVS’s ExtraBucks called Register Rewards. Same concept as the CVS program – buy a particular item and a coupon for so much off your next purchase prints at the register. The Walgreens program is a bit newer and isn’t quite as seemless as the CVS one, but there are still some great deals to be had there.
There are deals to be had out there, but likely combing through the Sunday paper for coupons is not the best use of your time, or money considering the cost of papers nowadays.
January 29th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
It depends on the types of items you buy. I buy Angel Soft toilet paper and I get coupons for $0.50 off from MyPoints or Coupons.com so I print those off and use them.
While it is true that most of the coupons are for brand name stuff you can sometimes get deals on the brand stuff. I drink canned milk and although I was brought up on Carnation, the Great Value is cheaper so I buy that all the time. I just got coupons for Carnation (I think in this Sunday’s paper) that made the Carnation cheaper than the store brand…so I bought the Carnation this time.
Like commentor BillyOceansEleven mentioned, if you use the coupons at stores like CVS then you start to see the savings. I use coupons with CVS Extra Bucks and get stuff like toothpaste for a few cents or for free.
Couponing is not for everyone…so sorry it did not work for you.
January 29th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
I agree that coupons are a waste of time. Everytime I’ve looked through coupons I don’t find any items we would normally purchase. I have a feeling many people purchase items just because they have a coupon for them, thus spending more then they normally would. Instead my wife and I make a grocery list every week and stick to it while at the store. This saves us money by not picking up the unecessary items that we used to buy on impulse.
January 29th, 2009 at 10:11 pm
The ability to save comes with how flexible you are and just how much you need to save money. As a kid my mom would routinely get items free / next to free to the point where a $60 grocery bill would come down to $25 or less. You would do this by only buying things that were on sale and that had a coupon. There was nothing we had to have. If there wasn’t a coupon for it we pretty much didn’t buy it.
Being a single mother on welfare with 3 kinds made this kind of shopping a necessity unless you are in a situation where you have to do it you probably won’t make the effort to really save money with coupons.
Also coupons right now are not as good as they used to be. You used to be able to get unlimited double coupons then a couple of years ago stores started to cut that back to 3 double coupons and then a few months before I moved out of Los Angeles all the stores stopped double coupons. I now live in northern California and no one here does double coupons and on top of that the coupons seem to be worse (not sure if that just has to do with companies reducing the use of coupons or living outside a metropolitan area).