artofthecoupon.com

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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…)

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…)

I’m excited.  Every two weeks, we go to this Butcher in this little local market in the city.  We’ve developed a relationship with him because I buy a lot of my puppies meat from him, and we get all our ground beef from him ($1.29/lb for the good stuff, all the time!).  He called me and told me that his supplier sent him an extra box of beef rips and that he needs to get rid of them, so he’s selling them for .59 lb.  Beef is the item that we have the hardest time finding for our puppies, but it is very important as a part of their diet.  So, needless to say I am thrilled and planning on buying 40-60 pounds of it!

So, it pays to develop relationships with local stores, and to shop outside of your standard “Grocery Store” environment.  Not only is it cheaper on a regular basis, but it also allows you great little perks that come from actually getting to know your store owner.  How many people can say that Mr. Safeway has their interests at heart and would give them a call if a good deal came??  Just some food for thought…

I got together with some old school friends a week or so ago, and handed them all goody baskets filled with toiletries.  They were impressed with all the stuff I had gotten for free and asked some questions.  I answered, and they were interested so I told them I would send them weekly shopping lists for the national stores (Walgreen’s, CVS, Wal-Mart, Rite Aid). 

 Well, I got emails from two of them today when I hadn’t sent out the shopping list by this afternoon.  Apparently they were looking for it… they had done the deals last week and were hooked already.  I was so proud!  I immediately sent out the email (which I had been working on anyway).  And, one of my friends also sent as a mass email with a deal SHE had found!  Talk about the student learning quickly!!! 

 So, there is hope… maybe not everyone will become a mad, coupon-happy, binder toting toiletry collector.  But, if just a few people do than I will have made a difference.

 (BTW, I don’t post my shopping lists here because there are already so many good places to get this info on the Internet already… but if anyone is interested in me doing this, leave me a comment and I’ll put my lists up on Mondays)

I was in line at Walgreens today and there were two older women behind me.  As always, I had my stack of coupons and my coupon binder was resting in the baby seat.  They started to talk to each other, commenting on how organized I was.  Then, one of them went on to say “I just wouldn’t do that… it’s not worth the time to save a few cents on paper towels.”  This is a common comment from coupon-haters.  And I’m here to tell you that it is very very misguided!   (more…)

I’ve written a few posts that are designed to help you save money on groceries, so I thought I would provide a very brief and basic summary: (more…)

Lately, the deals at CVS haven’t been quite as good, so I have been expanding to Walgreens and Rite-Aid.  These stores, too, offer a wealth of great deals.  But, they can be confusing for newbies to the Drug Store game.  This confusion is compounded by the fact that there are different rules for Walgreens, Rite-Aid, and CVS.  Here, I provide a guide to newbies who want to take advantage of the deals that Walgreens has to offer. (more…)

According to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal “Stocking up on food may… may make a sensible home for some of your shorter-term cash. ”  Reading (and forwarding) this article provided me with a measure of vindication because some members of my family have implied that I am a bit on the crazy side after seeing my full pantry.  It also made me very glad that I have been building a stock pile of food for almost a year, so we not as impacted by the price of groceries as many others are in these tough economic times.  However, while the Wall Street Journal Article touched on the idea of buying in bulk, it fell short of explaining the how of buying and organizing your stock pile.  Here is a basic step-by-step introduction for Stockpiling.   (more…)

Extrabucks, the free “cash” you get for buying certain products at CVS, have a 1 month expiration date.  So, there are a few different ways people handle these.  Some people (no one reading frugal websites I hope!) forget about them and let them go to waste.  Others turn around and spend them on the first thing they need from the drugstore.  Still others will refuse to spend extracare bucks on anything that doesn’t net them more than they spend, so they end up with a glut of expiring extracare bucks and managing cards begins to feel more like a job than a fun and frugal activity.   (more…)

For those who aren’t familiar with the Extracare program, let me give you a brief summary of how CVS-ing turned into a verb, and why there are a select few of us who frequent the store 3, 4, 5, even upwards of 6 times a week. (more…)