Category Archives: Library

What To Clip?

A few months ago, I wrote a short How to Begin Couponing post. Continuing on with beginner advice, a question I often receive is “What coupons should I be clipping”".

My response depends on what the goal is for the person asking: Hardcore couponing or reducing your food bill 20-25% while still being brand loyal, or just learning to coupon.

Why the difference? Well some hardcore is not going to care about brand loyalty at all. The main goal of a hardcore couponer is “If it is free, it’s for me!” And they want the stockpile to prove it. The goal is to never have to purchase anything for more than pennies again. While this goal is not always achievable (we all have to work with local market/retailer constraints), it is the goal. Many hardcore couponers will clip every single coupon in the inserts and file them for later under the heading “hey, you never know”. Printables, due to ink costs, are done more judiciously.

If you are just looking to save a decent amount but are brand loyal, the task is actually more difficult. If you love, love, LOVE Jif peanut butter and will only buy that brand, you may have a difficult time of it. Jif seldom puts out coupons. On the other hand, Skippy puts out frequent coupons, is frequently on sale, and will have Catalina or mail in rebate offers.

So until you have the chance to build you own Price Book and recognize reoccurring sales, what coupons should you clip or print if you do not have the time nor inclination to clip and sort every coupon in the inserts?

B1G1 Coupons

B1G1 coupons are great to use at the three major drugstores as they all run B1G1 sales and they all have a policy of accepting B1G1 coupons when only bringing two B1G1 items to the register. This results in two free!

High Value Coupons

High value is relative. The Glory 90¢ is high value if you have double coupons to 99¢. This makes it $1.80 off each item. Others consider $1 coupons high value, or $5, or $10 coupons. (As a quick aside: have I ever seen a 99¢ manufacturer coupon in national release? Nope. Special K put out a 93¢ coupon in 1993, a 94¢ coupon in 1994, a 95¢ coupon, etc but they did not put out a 99¢ coupon in 1999.)

And do no worry of it is some crazy product like the $30 Bayer Meter coupons. You may not need 50 meters, but you can donate them. And that $30 coupon? It ended up being huge money makes (ok free-stuff-makers) at Walgreens when we were all “paid” $5 and $10 in register rewards to take each one out the door.

Frequently Purchased Items Coupons

Now if you have a dirty little secret, of course you are going to clip as many of those coupons as possible. But, by frequently purchased I mean this: Your family seems to go through a ton of laundry detergent. Purex or Wisk or All may not be your favorite detergents, but they have $3 coupons so you clip them. Laundry soap is laundry soap (barring allergies), so clip those frequently used product coupons.

Many of the frequently used product coupons overlap the high value or B1G1 coupons category.

It will become much easier to decide what to clip as your price book becomes larger and you get a “feel” for what frequently goes on sale or sells at a low price. If you are concerned about throwing something away before that feel develops, well you can always use the lazy method of coupons organization and keep your inserts whole.

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Stocking The Liquor Cabinet – On The Cheap!

Hubby and I like to have a stocked liquor cabinet. I’d say for medicinal purposes only, but that would be a lie. As anyone that purchases more than one bottle of liquor a year knows, stockpiling the liquor cabinet can quickly become very expensive.

So how do we keep the costs in line?

• We know what it in our liquor cabinet. We try not to buy 3-4 alike items unless it is cost effective to do so.

• We know our regional prices. If something goes on sale, we know if it is a good deal or not.

• Not only do we shop the sale, we utilize rebates. Even folks who will not rebate for anything else will mail in for a $20 liquor rebate. This past week we bought these sale items:

Black Heart Spiced Rum $10 – $10 MIR = FREE!

Evan Williams Honey Reserve $14.99 – $10 MIR = $4.99

The Irishman Irish Whiskey $32.99 – $20 MIR = $12.99

360 Vodka (1.75L) $33.99 – $20 MIR = $13.99

So sales + rebates = significant discounts when filling the liquor cabinets.

If you drink a particularly high end liquor, a sale + rebate may not work for you. Maybe one of these tips will help you:

• When hubby and I go on vacation, we like to go on cruises. One of the things you can do when going to the Caribbean, especially to Puerto Rico or the US Virgin Islands where even more is allowed, is bring back several duty free bottles of liquor. The price we pay for Tequila in Mexico or Rum in Puerto Rico or Jamaica is about 30% – 50% of what we’d pay at home. While not the object of the vacation, it is a nice bonus. Since the 3.4oz regulations have been in effect for airline travel to the US several years now, we purchased bottle mailers. We open up the mailers and lay them flat in our suitcases. When we purchase a bottle, we put the mailer together as for mailing, and then inside a plastic bag. We then pack this among padded items.

• As close as I am to the Canadian border, we do have duty free stores at the bridges. While the prices are quite good, I’ve yet to see something FAR there (not that I go that often). However, for especially high priced or high duty items, a duty free store is a good alternative.

Now my advice is only pertinent in New York State. In Utah I know where the liquor stores are located (which always makes hubby laugh as I do not go to Salt Lake more than three times per year), but they are few and far between and highly regulated. I’ve never purchased more than wine At a liquor store in Utah.

Which brings me to questions for you: How do you save on stocking your liquor cabinet? Can you save in your state, or it it all state stores with tight regulations? Are rebates and sales allowed in your states? I’d ask what folks in dry counties do, but I am certain that they too stay dry as their county law regulates.

What are your tips, tricks and hints for stockpile a liquor cabinet on the cheap (if you choose not to abstain)?

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How To Begin Couponing

So you want to start to coupon and save money!? YAY! You may have a question or two or six hundred fifty-three on how to proceed. Everyone takes a different path to learning, and everyone has a different reason to coupon, but many folks may not know how to begin. What do you do? Is it as easy as buying a Sunday newspaper with inserts or printing an online coupon and walking into a store?

Actually, it is almost that easy to begin.

My advice to you if you are just starting out is to do a bit of research on your own.

• Check your local newspaper to see what day they carry coupon inserts, Saturday or Sunday. Check if your local paper has the Smart Source and Red Plum inserts. Also check to see if they carry the Proctor & Gamble insert. In some areas the Red Plum and P&G (Proctor & Gamble) arrive in your mail. My recommendation is not to start with more than four newspaper inserts your first week. You want to ease into this, not burn yourself out within a month. If your area has several large newspapers available, check the prices of the papers and look at the denominations to see what newspaper is the best deal. If you are lucky enough to live in an area with Hispanic newspapers, they are free and have inserts that are as good as, or better than, the paid newspapers.

Find a great printable coupon source!

• Check the policies and procedures of your local grocery stores. Do not forget smaller area stores as sometimes the locally owned chains have the best prices or loss leaders. See if the store doubles coupons. Does the store require a shopper’s discount card? Sign up for your local store’s email alerts. You never know what a store might send!

• Find out what drug stores are in your area. If you have Rite Aid and CVS, you need to sign up for their shopper’s card. Read the Rite Aid Tutorial the Walgreens Tutorial and/ore CVS Tutorial for a basic working knowledge of these drug stores.

• Find 10 bloggers to follow. Ideally, a minimum of two or three should personally write up the deals for stores in your area. The reason I say personally (as opposed to trading with someone or paying someone to write the posts), is because you want a blogger that has working knowledge of the policies, procedures, nuances and sale history of those stores. You want to follow at least a few people who have a through knowledge of the store until you gain your own working knowledge of that store. Until you are an expert, you want to rely on someone else’s expertise. Make certain that those bloggers are willing to answer your questions too. It will not do you any good to read a deal write-up you do not understand and have no one willing to explain it to you! That will lead to frustration and your quitting before you’ve begun.

• When you read a deal write-up, understand that you must double check your prices and sale fliers as all the drug stores and every grocery chain will put out regional ad in different areas of the country. Until you learn your region, double check – heck, even after confirming your flier regions, double check!

Deciphering couponing abbreviations and acronyms can be difficult. Here’s a cheat sheet.

• Do not worry about Coupon Organization until you have a few weeks worth of coupons and you know you are going to stick with this. If you are still couponing after a month, it is time to pick a method. Don’t worry if you need to change methods. Heck, I’ve been at this over 25 years and I’ve changed my coupon organization method dozen of times! You’ll know what works for you because it will be the method that allows you to find coupons easily while causing you the least amount of stress organizing.

• Here’s a few tips on how to prepare that first coupon shopping order.

• Read through my library topics. Some of those posts, believe it or not, are reeeeeaaaalllly informative. I know. Shocks me too.

• Take it slow. You may not be able to save 95% on every order to start, and it may be a few months before you can get hundreds of dollars of groceries for free, but it will happen.

The first few weeks you are learning, not necessarily stockpiling. Keep the orders small if possible so you can learn that yes, this worked! and no this didn’t!
Don’t run into Walgreens and try and roll 20 Register Rewards, you’ll just end up frustrated.
Do one organized order, two at the most.
Check your receipt to make certain all went well.
Go out to your car, and deposit your bag(s).
Regroup.
Now if you want to go back and do another order, go ahead and go back in the store.

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Coupon-tingle

I have a coupon-tingle. It works a lot like spidey-sense, except it involves me, not Spiderman, and it involves coupons, not bad guys.

Coupons are actually the good-guys.

So what is a coupon-tingle? It is that special sixth sense that compels you to walk down an aisle in the grocery store – that you would normally bypass – because you “think” there might be a coupon tear pad (or rebate form) hanging on the shelf or a shipper.

And, inevitably, there is.

I developed the coupon-tingle early on in my couponing-career. I’d walk down an aisle not knowing why, until I spotted the pad of coupons hanging on the bottom shelf at a diagonal because they had been kicked a million times – but no one had removed even one coupon – it was too low to the ground. Sometimes I would spot a coupon out of he corner of my eye and I would not consciously recognize that fact, the glimpse was so fleeting. My subconscious would take over forcing me to back-up and see exactly what that tear pad or coupon was for. I always trust that instinct, it has yet to fail me!

Around year five I noticed my coupon-tingle morphed into a super sense. No shipper was safe, no tear pad was secure, I was going to find them all!

Mwa-ha-ha

Er …

I mean …

My coupon-tingle developed over the years until it truly became a super sense. The places I have found coupons and rebate forms boggles even my mind… at the bottom of a freezer in the meat department, behind a tower of beer cases (don’t ask how I get those down, but it happens more often than you’d expect), frequently tear pads fall down behind an end-cap or shipper, in a produce bin, hidden in a box at the customer service desk (the most difficult find of all!); you name a spot in the store, I’ve probably found a tear pad there at some time or another.

Sometimes it seems the rep wants to make finding, and using, of a tear pad coupon or rebate as difficult as possible. “She does not deserve a dollar off unless she can jump through eight hoops while holding her nose and hopping on one foot while blindfolded.”

So I do. Figuratively speaking, of course.

The days of easy picking off the coupon boards at the front of the grocery store are long gone around here. My coupon-tingle has to compensate for that, and it does, making me a much more skilled tear-pad hunter.

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What Kind Of Couponer Are You?

How do you approach your couponing? As a hobby? As a necessity? As a business? Or as a game?

Casual Couponer

Are you a Casual Couponer? Do you clip coupons for “items you buy” from one weekly newspaper and/or magazines, and hunt for printables once in a blue moon to correspond with a hot sale or a need based purchase? Do you typically save 15% or less off your grocery bill? Do you shop the sales at the drug stores, but do not stockpile madly because you do not see the value?

A Casual Couponer enjoys saving but may not see the worth of stockpiling or hardcore couponing. Or the Casual Couponer is so short on time that a 10% – 20% weekly savings is the best they fit into very busy life, and the casual Couponer correctly thinks that some savings is always better than no savings. Or, a Casual Couponer has diet restrictions for either themselves or their family and find coupons difficult to come by with their dietary needs (these folks can typically be turned into Hardcore Drugstore Couponers).

Necessity Couponer

These folks basically must coupon to eat. They may/may not enjoy couponing and rebating, but regardless of the emotion attached to saving via sales, coupons and rebates, for Necessity Couponers the need to save is just that – an economic pressure of circumstance. Period.

Hardcore Couponer

These folks have figured out, and absolutely love, the “game”! Hardcore Couponers may have a stockpile to survive Armageddon, buy (or even better, get for free) 20+ papers per week or faithfully order from a coupon clipping service, and take a few of every tear pad “just in case”. They have the Coupons, Deals and More Printable Page set as their homepage, and they search coupons.com and smartsource.com several times a day for additions.

All their friends and family have bulging pantries and will not need to pay for shampoo or body wash until 2014. The local food pantry and homeless shelters know them by name because they donate so much! Hardcore stockpilers may/may not have an economic need to coupon or send for rebates, they do it for the (cheap) thrills!

The Judicious Couponer

The Judicious Couponer knows how to hardcore coupon. The Judicious Couponer may even be a former Hardcore Couponer. Due to time constraints, lack of room, and/or energy, The Judicious Couponer no longer chases every deal. These shoppers typically go through lifestyle changes including the children moving out, the start of a new job cutting into shopping time, or an illness. The Judicious Couponer may have also decided that chasing every deal is too aggravating due to store personal. The Judicious Couponer can turn into a Hardcore Couponer at anytime, but s/he is taking some time off from hardcore couponing for one or many of a multitude of reasons.

There are all sorts of reasons to coupon and rebate, and many folks fall in between these categories. So where do you fall on the spectrum? A Casual Couponer? Hardcore? Do you need to coupon? Like to coupon? Is this an obsession? Or are you one to sit back and determine if a deal is worth the chase? Or, are your couponing habits some combination of all of the above?

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Coupon Organization Methods

Me and my big mouth… er fingers.

I was soooooo darned proud of myself for clipping, sorting and filing my coupons. And I foolishly bragged about it! “Why was that foolish?” you might ask. Well, I received an email requesting that I post pictures of my organizational system!

Oy!

It seems my post last year was not good enough. Yeah, yeah, so those are stockpile pictures in a “Coupon Organization” post. Details, details.

I’ve had many organizational systems over the years. I still have remnants of them in the house. These are pictures of my coupon organization systems, past and present. I have no idea what the future holds.

Binder Method

I actually use two binders when using this method in full swing. The red binder is my non-food binder. I have a black binder (not shown) for food products. Both these binders zipper. This is an absolute must to prevent spills when dropped. There are tabs separating the different categories. The sheets are all 8″ x11″ with varying slot sizes. While the baseball card holders are the cheapest, I find them the most useless for organizing coupons. So few coupons are the size of those teeny-tiny slots. I like the old floppy disc sheets the best, the three slot picture holders are second best. I do utilize both sides of the sheet slots. In the bottom right hand corner of the top picture you will notice the blue clip that attaches it to the cart so no one can easily walk away with the binder in-store.





Whole Insert Method

This was my latest lazy coupon organization system. It was GREAT for filing. No clipping and sorting, you just plop whole inserts into the hanging folders and you are done. And the folders are reusable. Just cross out the date of the expired inserts, and write a new date on the folder.

This is by far the worst system to prepare for Sunday Morning Shopping. Saturday evening is a lot of clipping and sorting to prepare.

Time wise, I definitely spend less on coupon clipping and sorting with this method. However, the binder method means never having to miss a clearance deal because the coupons are right there with you in the store! And if super doubles or triples happen, the binder method is the way to go. Just load the binder in your cart and you are set.





Zip Lock Bag Method

Ok so this really isn’t tried and true a method. it is more like an “Ann Method”. I have done this on occasion when I am too lazy to load the binder, but I clipped and sorted that week’s inserts. As a matter of fact, I did this last week when I clipped all those coupons for the RAOK. For my purposes these are a great way to keep coupons I do not want to carry with me at all times, but that I might use, together in one spot.

All I do is put the sorted and clipped coupons in an envelope and write the insert date on the front. I will use my coupon insert list to locate the coupon week necessary if I ever find a deal that corresponds to these clipped coupons.



Coupon Envelope

When I used one binder I would take it into the store with me all the time. It elicited a lot of comments, almost 100% of which were from men. (This always surprised me.) Store management also used to look at me until they saw me with the binder a few times. If you are one that does not like undue attention, you may want to do what I did after I obtained a second binder and could not manage two binders in the cart.

I got a coupon envelope.

I would write up a list of sales, match the coupons and pull them from the binder. They all went into the envelope. The negative, of course, is that I do not have the coupons to match to any unadvertised sale or clearance merchandise when I am in the store. I’d have to run back to the car for my binder, or make a second trip into the store.

I really rely on the envelope now because it not only contains coupons to match to sales, but the coupons for the items I “think” might result in a good deals or that I would want to utilize if I can across an unadvertised sale or clearance merchandise. You would be surprised how well this has worked for me over the years. Now granted I have been at this a long time so I have an idea what might match together as good deals. I’m not certain how well this would work for someone just starting out.



And those are pretty much the main coupon organization methods I have used over the years.

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Part II – Budgeting: Does It Vary With Life Stages?

Do you have a budget? Are you faithful to it? Or do you feel budgeting is over-rated? If you have a budget, why do you have one? And if you do not have a budget, why not?

Yesterday I recounted my budgeting trial and errors during my first marriage.

As many of you know, my life has changed over the years. My former husband and I divorced quite some time ago, and I have since remarried. With my remarriage came a different set of financial rules.

First and foremost, my husband is a pretty smart guy. He went to school and ended up with an MBA. He put this to good use in the banking industry in various places, ending up in New York City for many years. Hubby had never been married prior to me (he waited for me!, aren’t I lucky?), and was used to doing things his way. Now during my first marriage, I was responsible for all the finances, bill paying, purchasing decisions, etc., etc. When hubby and I married, it could have been a real clash: each one of us was used to doing things in our own manner. Coupling that habit with being older, and naturally more set in our ways this could have led to a real disaster. Except it didn’t. I was tired of being responsible for everything and anything, and hubby enjoys responsibly. I think it is part of his genetic make-up.

We have a lot of bills (like all of them) on auto-pay. This means we know in advance how much will be going out each month a year ahead of time. While the utilities fluctuate monthly, there are historicals that we can use to make accurate determination about upcoming month’s utility bills.

Big differences now come to our credit cards: they are paid off monthly. Always. And a lot of credit card purchases are work expenses for hubby, so he has to turn in expense reports regularly for reimbursement. This basically gives his work free-float, although we do benefit from the points programs attached to the credit card.

If we need any capital expense to the house, we discuss what we are going to do, and hubby puts the money aside. For other big expenditures, like buying a car we research to the purchase to death and then hubby figures out the value of money to determine whether or not we will finance or pay cash for the item.

This business of the “value of money” drives me insane. I am firmly middle class in my economic mindset. Even though paying cash for your house can be economically foolish, mentally I would have loved it! But hubby figured out the value of money, what our rate of return would be with the money that was not tied up in an illiquid asset like property, as well as any tax benefits to having a mortgage, and so we plopped down 20% to avoid PMI and have a mortgage payment. At some point, the mortgage will no longer be a good money value and paying off the note early might make sense. We will revisit that concept in a few years to see if carrying a mortgage still makes economic sense. Because our mortgage rate is so low, I fear the answer. To me, not having a mortgage equates to economic serenity … after all what is peace of mind worth? Hubby’s answer is always “If you have the money in the bank to pay off the mortgage, isn’t that enough peace of mind?” (Note: Bank does not mean a savings account necessarily, but investment account.)

As you can see, the budgeting we do now is based on what needs to be paid and when it needs to be paid. Hubby makes a comfortable living and we do not live over our means (which took a budget to discover), so it is just a matter of paying the bills in a timely manner. In our current situation, the term budget is truly an accounting term. You start with XX dollars each month, and subtract the payments necessary. Excess funds are kept in an account earning interest or dividends. We are saving for retirement as we only have one child (mine), and he is entering his senior year in college. We’ve definitely moved into the middle years of budgeting where the unexpected bills of child-rearing are behind us and have moved on to the saving for retirement years.

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Part I – Budgeting: Does It Vary With Life Stages?

Do you have a budget? Are you faithful to it? Or do you feel budgeting is over-rated? If you have a budget, why do you have one? And if you do not have a budget, why not?

During my first marriage, my ex-husband and I married young, well what now seems very young. Back then, 22 and 24 was not really considered young to marry. When I look at Sonny-boy and think that I was married about his age… YIKES! is my only thought!

We were fresh out of college, I worked full time at a less than great job (with fantastic benefits), he worked part time and did not get a full time job until we had been married almost six months.

With our lack of funds came a great need to budget. The only problem was, even though we were decently educated household budgeting was not exactly a course offered at my college, although I wish it had been. Oh sure I had a class session or two that dealt with a household budget in my business accounting classes, but nothing that really stuck. This meant I had to learn to budget through trial and error. And let me tell you, there was a lot of error.

I was always underestimating real costs and praying my ex would get decent overtime. It was a skin-of-your-teeth approach, but it worked … barely. Once Sonny-boy was born we were really, really poor and skin-of-your-teeth was fast becoming more like robbing Peter to pay Paul. I had stopped working and we were relying on one income that was not all that great. I started couponing so we might eat. My ex-husband’s entire income went to pay the rent, utilities and whatever credit card debt we had. A budget was born of desperation. I needed to account for every penny we spent as our budget was that tight. Even a swing of ten unaccounted dollars could pose dire consequences.

Over the years, his income increased dramatically and I went back to work part-time. The budget relied less and less on rebates to pay bills, and went strictly for food costs. By then, couponing had become so ingrained in our way of life that I never did budget for food. By this I mean I did not use paycheck money to shop for food; coupons and rebates paid for what we ate. I had enough of a stockpile to have the luxury of not shopping when rebate funds were low and the ads were not full of free/cheap items.

I budgeted during my first marriage due to early extreme need, without any past budgeting experience. In the end, budgeting allowed us to purchase a house, buy new cars and put Sonny-boy through private schools.

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