artofthecoupon.com

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In my post The Truth About Saving Money with Groceries, I mentioned that sometimes you need massive quantities of a coupon, in order to get a good deal.  Since most people are not going to purchase 12 papers for cost reasons, here is a list of 13 alternate sources for coupons: (more…)

Please check out the Carnival of Twenty Something Finances at Money TLD, where my post In Defense of Cable TV was an editors pick.  You can check out some other great articles over there too including the oe I enjoyed the most, Money Nings post on the Eternal Pursuit of More Wealth.

My post, The Truth About Saving Money with Coupons was a part of the Festival of Frugality hosed at Funny About Money.  Over there, I especially liked The Ultimate PriceBook Database at the Suburban Dollar.

Finally, Stock Trading To Go Hosted the 195th Edition of the Carnival of Personal Finance, and included my post 4 Times Being Frugal Doesn’t Pay as well as another post I enjoyed, Million Dollar Journeys discussion of the Cost of Dog Ownership.  I think the cost for food listed is very low, because high quality food is vital in keeping your pet healthy and avoiding huge vet bills later on. 

There was a story on the Today Show today about how you can get like $100 worth of groceries for pennies.  This is a great story because it gets people interested inc ouponing and encourages frugality in the grocery store.  However, these types of stories never really show you the true picture.  Yes, you can cut your grocery bill to almost nothing.  Yes, you can get a few hundred dollars worth of stuff for a few pennies.  However, you will not be able to live on the $100 worth of stuff you got for a few cents, unless you have a whole plan in place for how to really make your grocery costs nothing over the long term.  (more…)

I am all for saving money, but there are some times when cutting costs can definitely end up costing you a lot more in the long run.  (more…)

About a month or so ago, Rite Aid had some diabetes monitors that were fre after a coupon in the Inner Strength book.  I purchased three of them, using the Rite Aid coupons, in order to use a $5/25 coupon.  So, with each one I purchased I got $15 in free stuff from Rite Aid (mostly milk and eggs).  Well, I decided to send in the three rebates from the monitors, just to see what would happen- I figured it was worth the cost of a stamp. And it definitely was.  I got 3 checks yesterday- 2 for $40.00 and 1 for $9.99 (I have no idea why the amounts were different).  That is $89.99 in FREE MONEY!  This has really convinced me that it will be entirely possible to spend $0 on groceries after rebates and garage sale.

That is a challenge I’m going to be unveiling after my garage sale in May- I will state the total I have spent to earn the items I sell at the garage sale; and then I will state the total amount of money that I made.  However much I make, I’m going to set that amount as our annual grocery budget and ensure that we keep underneath that amount for the year.  If I can sustain that on a yearly basis, continuing to acquire and sell items at a garage sale and get rebates, then our groceries can be really free for the foreseeable future