Girls clothes are cute. REALLY cute. I say this because it's my excuse/reasoning behind my slight shopping problem :) If they weren't so stinkin' cute, it wouldn't be an issue! Ha! So in an effort to ease my guilty conscience, I decided to look for ways to save a little money in other areas. First way that I found....COUPONS!!
Some of you may watch Extreme Couponing on TLC and think that those people are crazy. I watch it and think that they're all geniuses! Well...kinda. I mean, I guess they might be a little crazy, but HELLO...they pay like $2.00 for over $100 worth of groceries! Ummm, yes please! So a few weeks ago I set out to start saving, & though I didn't save anywhere near what those people did, I wasn't too disappointed. My goal is to whittle my grocery bill down 40%. Lofty, yes. Doable...the jury is still out, but I'll let y'all know!
The first thing I did was scope out some good websites for info. I tried The Grocery Game about a year ago, but I really didn't want to pay for anything. After a little research, I found that Kitty over at Coupon Divas does almost exactly the same thing for free! Just from her website, there are: links to online coupons, deals of the week, store match-ups (a detailed list of what coupons to use at which stores for the most savings!), tutorials on how to stock up and save & all kinds of freebies. She's great! There is also a list of all the restaurants in your area that do "kids eat free", and the days that they're available. I'm telling you, if you're new to couponing like I was, this is your resource!
The most valuable thing that I learned in my research is that if you want to truly save some money, it's going to take some time & organization. I don't live in a very urban area, so there aren't very many coupons in my Sunday paper. Because of that, I have to buy both the local paper & the bigger city paper to find the best deals. I wasn't too excited about that, but last week I spent $2.50 on the papers and clipped $75+ worth of coupons!! Seriously! It took me about an hour to cut them all out, and then I ended up buying one of those small accordion files at Walmart so that I could organize them all. Just FYI, my immediate thought was to use some of the coupons that day; however, I've found that if you hold onto them for about 3 weeks, your local stores will put most of those same items on sale...so you can use your coupons then and save even more!
A few pointers if you're thinking of starting:
Don't get discouraged. First time I tried it, I saved $3.00. I didn't think it was even worth it! But the last time I bought groceries, I saved about $30...which was 20% of my bill! MUCH better!
If you use a website match-up, make sure it applies to your city. Can you tell where this is going?! I didn't check to make sure that my local store had the same sales as what I found online and I ended wasting about 5 coupons & bought stuff I really didn't need. Oops!!
Use your discount card. I don't really like Kroger, but when they have 10 for $10 sales you can use your discount card + your coupons to get things for free! Yes, FREE!! Also, they double coupons up to 50 cents every day :)
Speak Up! If you know me at all, you know that I really dislike confrontation. But, sometimes you need to let people know that there has been an error. Walmart honors competitors prices...even on sale items. If they don't give you the right price, tell them.
And lastly, if you're wondering about the random picture of Elli at the top of my post, well...it's from a little photo shoot I did today :) Deal Wise Mommy (another GREAT deals website) posted that SeeHere is offering 24 photo cards for just $2.49 (which is the shipping). I made some super cute ones for Valentines Day, and if you head over there right now you can too!!
Happy Couponing!!
