artofthecoupon.com

Welcome back!

I finally got some pics uploaded yesterday that offer you a little tour through my frugal world.  I hope you enjoy them.  We’ll be back tomorrow with a continuation of the How To Coupon And Have a Life series.  In the meantime, enjoy my stockpile pics and coupon binder pics! (more…)

Now that you have organized all your coupons, as instructed in Step 1, you need to figure out when is the best time to use them!  Ideally, you want to use them when there is a great sale that makes the item cheap or free.  When this great sale happens, you want to buy a whole bunch of the item so that you never have to buy it when it isn’t on sale.  So, how do you match up the sales with the coupons?  You could pay money to do it, to a service called the Grocery Game.  Or, you could spend a few minutes looking at all the great free material that is available, and you can do it yourself! (more…)

Some of you may be finding my thread from MSN, and welcome to all of those who are new (wherever you came from!).  I was very excited to get a mention, and I’m so glad to have new readers to talk to!  I encourage anyone stopping by for the first time to subscribe to my RSS feed.  You can also subscribe via email by registering.  I try to write about 4-5 posts a week, and share information on saving money, debt, spending, and frugality.  I also let my readers in on my personal quest to get out of over $100K in student loan debt (darn that Sallie Mae!).

I also encourage you to check out some of my favorite posts:

Step By Step Guide to Grocery Savings

Why Its So Important To Track Your Expenses

My Comment on a Discover Card Commercial With a Terrible Lesson

Lessons My Parents Taught Me About Money

How We Finally Stopped Fighting About Money

How to Save Energy and Impress Your Friends Using X10 Home Automation

Ways to Pay Down Your Mortgage Faster

Couponing, as well as the related tasks of shopping and organizing your stockpiles, can become a tremendous burden on your time if you aren’t careful.  One reader commented and asked if I could offer suggestions for how to organize everything, especially when you do have limited time.  My best answer is to let others do the work for you.  I don’t mean turn your children into slave labor and have them cut coupons all day.  Instead, I mean that there are a ton of resources out there that do the hard work so you can just reap the rewards.  So, I’ve decided to do a Mini-Series that explains how to easily and quickly organize your coupons.  Here is step one, check back tomorrow for step 2.   (more…)

The cold weather is approaching here.  We’re starting to ready ourselves for a long cold winter, lol.  The good thing about winter is that I don’t like to drive in it, so we save a lot of gas money.  I also don’t like to go out in it, so if we had entertainment expenses (which we now do not) we’d save a lot of money on those.  But, aside from the stay-inside-and-never-leave plan, here are 5 more Frugal Fall Tips: (more…)

Can anyone explain to me why the money I have in gold stocks keeps going down?  Aren’t people supposed to turn to gold when the world falls to pieces?  We bet on gold and oil because they seemed like safe bets… what happened?!?!? 

I’m frustrated.  I’ve made $1791.00 in payments on my Private Student Loan, and I’ve only reduced the payoff balance by $1321.23.  The interest monster ate $469.77! All these payments were made between September 1 and October 9, so it isn’t like we are talking years here.  So, it only took that little demon a little over one month to eat all this money!  And this is for a 7% loan of about $25K.  The interest monster is really gorging over at Sallie Mae where I have $76,617.19 in various loans ranging from 6.8% - 7.5% fixed.  Over at Sallie, this little bugger has eaten $956.63 since May! (more…)

I wrote a post here discussing whether I should take a balance transfer or not.  I ultimately did apply for a Citi Upromise Platinum Select Card and got approved for a $7000 line of credit.  I requested a balance transfer check for $6850 of that which allowed DF to pay off 2 of his cards and pay the bulk of what he needed to get the tax deduction for his student loan interest (his loans are in deferment until his cards get paid off, but he needs to pay $2500 in interest annually to get the $2500 tax deduction). (more…)

I’m very depressed about the stock market.  Our relative, who was going to give us a down payment for a house some day soon, has lost like $78,000 in the past month.  I won’t get started on this.  Instead, I want to offer you some of the worst possible suggestions to surviving the blood bath out there.  So, here you go, the 10 Worst Ways to Survive a Down Economy: (more…)

I have a busy cooking day planned.  I’m going to try my hand at making pie crust from scratch! And then I’m going to bake some apple pies.  I’m also going to make a huge batch of Pesto to freeze with the last of our basil before winter sets in.  

If my pie crusts turn out well, I’ll share the recipe here.  I’m working on compiling a list of simple basic frugal recipes.  My goal one day is to make everything from scratch, not only to avoid paying the premium for convenience foods but also to improve my health.  There’s so much bad food and so many bad chemicals out there, I want to return to the simpler days when everything was home cooked and delicious and didn’t slowly kill you.  

I’m also working on compiling a list of 101 ways to save money on groceries, hopefully it will be up by the end of next week. Stay tuned (or subscribe! please subscribe!) so you don’t miss it.