Tiny little organizing job

I love coupons.  I love to match coupons with sales and get rock-bottom prices.  I *don't* love the organization of my coupon inserts.  Here they are stacked in among my books on the office bookcase.  I stack them by the quarter with dates written on the front so I can easily access them.  Easy to use, but hard on the eyes.

My $1 Target find.  A magazine holder made of sturdy cardboard.

Here are the previous two quarters of coupon inserts.  Ignore that dust, okay?  Doesn't that look a lot better?  They are still nearby, but look so much better.

Here is my current quarter.  I decided to leave them facing out because I get into them frequently.  Or maybe I'll just learn to pull them in and out and put them pretty side out anyway.

Progress is progress!

Half of the shopping trip

I bought food items as well as cleaning items, but I'm keeping the food items for the Saturday roundup. Thanks to good sale prices and aggressive couponing, everything in the picture cost only about $12.50 + sales tax of 9.1%

Three toothbrushes and two tubes of toothpaste have already been given away. It's just so easy to get these items for free (+ 9.1% sales tax . . . ) that I get too many of them in the storage cupboard and NEED to give them away.

Read near the bottom of this post to get a great perspective on shopping during the Pantry Challenge.

Tomorrow's shopping trip

I know, I know.  Pantry Challenge.  Don't shop gratuitously.  But I'm going to anyway.  This is the first time in more than a month I'll have shopped to add to the pantry vs. just use it within a week.

On the outside of the envelope I have my shopping list . . .

. . . and inside are all the coupons I intend to use.

Neat, huh?

My jaw dropped

I've mentioned quite a few times that I like to use coupons to cut my grocery costs.  The couponing sites I go to are scrupuously honest in advising the readers on the best and proper way to use coupons.

But!  Today I followed an advertising link to a site with some coupons, along with some "helpful" couponing tips such as this:

Extreme Couponing Tip #1
One episode of Extreme Couponing shows us that a person using the coupons for a certain size of item for the same product and brand but of different size. The featured couponer shows us that in order to really save on the stuff we buy on the grocery, just try to trick the grocery computer.
You see, the grocery computer will never read the letter and words written on the coupons, as the person in Extreme Couponing shows it, computers read only the codes printed on them. So although the coupon is for a bigger size for a particular brand, when the computer scan your coupon, as what happened in the Extreme Couponing show, the computer will only read the discount. So if your coupon is 50% for a 1 Liter of an item and if you use it for a 500ml of the same brand, the computer will never be able to tell the difference.

Ummm . . . that is coupon fraud and I would NEVER recommend anyone do that!  I am super careful to carefully read the coupon and follow the requirements to a "T."  Really--if I'm going to steal it's certainly not going to be 20 cents on a box of cereal.

And no, I'm not going to link the site here. ;-)  I probably downloaded a hundred viruses by clicking on that link anyway.

 

Super bargains

I'm back in the sale/coupon groove again after taking off for vacation. Couponing isn't really a casual hobby if you really want to save money. I don't just cut out a coupon here and there and take it off to the grocery store *if* I remember to. Nope, I have a system of a small file box of extraneous coupons and careful stacks of the Sunday newspaper advertising inserts in my office. I don't cut them out until I know I'm going to need them.

How do I know if I'm going to need them? I go to afullcup.com and I find out what coupons I'm going to need and where they are. THEN I cut them out of the advertising inserts or print them off the Internet. It's just easier that way. The extraneous coupons in my file come from the little blinking machines in the store, magazines, inside product packages, and previously printed off the Internet. I'd say 60-75% of my grocery store shopping is done by looking for a sale and also by looking for a sale and then matching a coupon to that sale to really get rock-bottom prices.

My first stop yesterday was at Fry's. It's a Kroger-family store.
Pineapples $1 each -$.50/1 mq x2 Fry's doubled each coupon to $1=FREE.
Brownie mix $2.49 each -$.75/2 doubled to $1, -$.75/2 ecoupon with a $1 bonus from the ecoupon company, -$1/1 Betty Crocker mq because I complained about a product's quality.

However, Fry's made a mistake in my favor. They charged me the regular price for the brownie mix so I marched myself (and three dds) right over to the customer service counter and asked for the correct price. For their mistake they gave me one box for free and refunded the difference. I walked out with the four items free and 28 cents extra in my pocket thanks to the coupons and the free item.

Albertson's was playing games this week. Hold on to your hat and I'll explain this one. Buy 10 Kellogg's/Morning Star/Keebler products for $3/each and get $10 off your order (=$2/each). Then you get a $10 Catalina coupon good on your next order at Albertson's (=$1/each). THEN you use coupons. I mostly had $1/2 mqs on the cereal and $1/1 for the Morning Star items.

I had coupons for all the other items as well, either Albertson's newspaper coupons or Albertson's coupons + mqs. My total for all of this plus 2 gallons of milk was a hair over $37 AND I still have a $10 Catalina coupon for my next trip.

So here are the ups and downs of this kind of shopping. The downside is that coupons tend to be on processed, packaged food. The pineapples were a rarity in the couponing world. Another downside is that on a trip-by-trip basis or even a weekly basis, the food I buy is lopsided. Lots of cereal this week. No soup, beans, eggs, and so forth. Because of that, I devote a lot of space to food storage. Over several months' time, it all evens out, but I have to be able to store it to have a balanced supply of food at any given time.

The upside is that my family likes processed food and I balance it with homemade bread, cheese and other dairy products, lots of fresh fruits and vegatables, and meat. The other obvious upside is that my cost for feeding my family is quite low and I always have lots of food on hand in the house.

Perverse pleasure

One of the techniques I use to get excellent bargains is to use coupons. For those who haven't used coupons in a few years, you may not know the Internet coupon business is a big business in the US. You can print coupons from the Internet for lots of things on your shopping list. The disadvantage is you have to pay for the paper and ink. The advantage is you can often find a coupon for something you want to buy RIGHT NOW and don't have to play the guessing game of figuring out when a coupon may show up in a magazine or in your Sunday paper.

A sheet of coupons I printed out this morning:



Notice those scissors? A sewing expert will recognize them as Gingher knife-edge fabric shears. You know, the kind that you don't even cut the pattern paper with? Those are the scissors I use for cutting out all my coupons. And why would I do that to a pair of expensive fabric shears? Because I have another identical pair I use for fabric, first of all, but mainly because these ones belonged to dh's first wife and it brings me perverse pleasure to use them to cut out all my paper coupons. They are great scissors!