Couponing, because Vince Asked

Okay, so it's been mumble*threeyears*mumble time since my last update of this blog. And maybe I should get back on the horse, if anyone out there is/was still reading.

But, it's a handy way to share some couponing tips with folks who are interested, so here goes:

First: my recently posted savings are a bit unusual, since I am working my way through "spending" coupons for free food items from a local grocery store. They run a promo once each spring where they sell small chest freezers (5.0 cubic feet) for $200.....which is about what the same freezer goes for at Home Depot or Lowe's. BUT, if you buy it at the grocery store, they give you $200 worth of coupons for free....freezer food. A lot of those items are not things that we normally buy and use, but hey, free food, so we'll get it and eat it eventually.

That's not the kind of couponing I'm going to write about, because that is a once-and-done deal for our family. I'm also not going to talk about the extreme couponing that you see on TV shows. Lots of those people stock up on things years in advance of when their families will use them, or simply take advantage of finding things for free, and then donating the excess to local shelters or food banks. No, the kind of couponing that I'm going to write about is the system I've developed that work for Brian, the fur-critters, and I. We're a small family, but we've got a fair amount of storage, which lets me stock up on things that we do use that will store long-term, while lowering our grocery costs fairly significantly. We try to buy a lot of our fresh food locally and freeze it. We are a "medium" on the scale of all-fresh to all-prepared foods. We'll buy store bought pasta and spaghetti sauces, but add our own meat/veggies to the sauce. We rarely buy things like Hamburger Helper and make our own pizza at home rather than buying freezer pizza.

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Set yourself up for Success

1) What grocery stores are near you? How many of them are you willing to visit in a week to save? Are there any stores that offer added bonuses like coupons off your next order, or gas points? Are there any stores that you just hate shopping at, that make it not worth your time to go there, no matter how much money you save? Do any stores take competitor's coupons? Which stores double coupons, and for how much? Which stores give you credits for bringing your own bags and which don't? For example, we have three local grocery chains--one is near Brian's place of work, and two are across the street from each other. All three are within five miles of our house, so it's an easy, short trip. Two of the stores offer gas reward points--spend X-much money, get Y-much money off your next gas fill-up, and the participating gas stations are also on our commute and routinely have competitive gas prices. One of them makes me mental, though, because the customers are rude, the produce is yicky, there's never enough cashiers on duty, and one of their shopping carts attacked me in the parking lot last week when it tangled with a pot-hole, leaving me limping all week and sporting a spectacular bruise on my knee. All of those things make that particular store not worth it to be part of a weekly rotation, but when staples go on sale, I do make stops there.

2) Figure out which things you're brand-loyal to, and which things you are omnivorous about. We don't really care about which brand of spaghetti sauce we eat, so we stock up on whatever is on sale with a coupon. On the other hand, we do prefer some name-brand cereals to the generic store-brands, so those we watch closely for sales.

3) Figure out what days your store flyers cover. Two of our stores go Friday-Thursday, and one goes Sunday-Saturday. Make sure you know when the deals start and stop.

4) Scout your stores over a couple of weeks, and figure out when the store is empty. I prefer later Saturday evenings and early Sunday mornings for shopping. Your mileage may vary based on your community, church/synagogue attendance, and days that sale flyers start.

5) Figure out how you will organize your coupons. Some people use 3-ring binders with baseball card sleeves. Some people use recipe card boxes. I use this coupon organizer, which velcros shut, has unlabeled dividers, and fits in my purse. I made sections for each store that I shop at, then categories of coupons, then a slot for Bed, Bath & Beyond coupons, one for department stores, and one for restaurants. My pen and shopping list fit inside fairly easily. What works for you might vary.

6) Get your hands on print coupons! Subscribe to your local paper. In print. Yes, really. Most papers will have a subscription option for just Sunday, or for weekends-only delivery. Figure out which one gets you the Sunday Paper coupons, and do that subscription. It's generally cheaper to subscribe than to just go to the gas station and buy a paper every Sunday. Plus, when your subscription runs out, the papers will usually cut you a deal on a reduced subscription price to renew.

7) Check out electronic coupons. Redplum puts out the coupon flyers in your paper, and they also have a website where you can print more than one copy of the coupons you liked from the paper. Coupons.com SmartSource, RedPlum, and Val-Pak also have useful coupons for our family. Kelloggs.com and other manufacturer sites have coupons, but much less regularly. If there's a good local sale, though, it's worth the time to google for extra coupons. A word on electronic coupons, though: be careful that you're not spending more on ink and paper than you're saving in coupons. I always set my printer to draft black and white printing when I print coupons.

7) a) If you get REALLY in to couponing, you can buy coupons on eBay or sign up to participate in coupon trains where you send along unused coupons to people, and receive unused coupons from others. This hasn't been something that is useful for our family, but I understand that it allows monster savings if you're buying lots of consumable things like, say, diapers or baby foods.

8) Don't be afraid to take the time to ask for rain checks. Say tuna goes on sale, and someone cleans out all 300 cans of tuna at your store. Instead of checking back multiple times during the week, go to the Customer Service desk and ask for a rain check. Then you can buy the tuna on your next trip to the store even if it's no longer on sale.

Now you're almost ready to shop. The final steps are making a list, and organizing your coupons. The goal is to stack your savings: buy items that are on sale, and use a coupon to get a further discount. It's a little bit like a scavenger hunt, and a little bit like a memory game.

Writing the List
I keep several running grocery lists. One is the day-to-day things that we've run out of--milk, cheese, fresh fruits and vegetables, yogurt. These are things that may go on special, but rarely have coupons in the paper. The other lists I generate with the weekly store flyers. You'll find the rhythm that works for you, but I like to read the sale flyers first and see what's on sale at each store. Read the flyer carefully. Lots of things will be featured, but not actually marked down. Or, the flyer will show something on sale, but it's only $0.30 or $0.40 off. Lots of stores use BOGO to mean both buy one get one free, and buy one, get one half-off. As you get the hang of it, you start to know what is a significant discount, and what is just the store trying to drive sales of certain items. It takes me 20-30 minutes to go through the three store flyers and make a list of things on good sale at each store that we're going to stock up on. Once I have my store-by-store lists, I add the day-to-day things to the store list where I will get the most extra rewards for not buying things on sale, or to the list that has the brand/flavore I like/whatever.

Next, I go through the week's coupon flyers, clipping out coupons for anything that we use, whether I'm going to buy it that week or not. If I find a coupon for something that is already on my list, I make a mental note to get duplicate coupons online for the item.

Finally, I go through my coupon organizer, putting in the new coupons, discarding expried ones, and pulling out the coupons I'm going to use for the week. I sort them by store so I have my fist full of coupons all ready to go when I get to the store.

Going Shopping
When you're ready to attack, go to the store in the mental mindset that you're ONLY buying things on your list. I always forget things on my list that I think of as I'm shopping, but that's an easy way to have your bill creep up. Whenever possible, I try really really hard to simply stick to my list. I try not to walk up and down every aisle, but only go SPECIFICALLY for the things on the list.

If I'm buying multiples of things and I have a coupon, I note that down in my list. Be as specific as possible in your list, because it's easy to mis-read the fine print on the coupon while you're shopping. For example, this week, my list read: Cascade Pods: $3.99/20 pk, plus $1/off 2 + $0.20 off.

Loosely translated: the Cascade pods were on sale for $3.99 for a pack of 20 pods (or 20 loads of dishes in the dishwasher). Regular price was 4.49. I had one coupon for $1.00 off two packages. I had a second coupon for $0.20 off a single package. We're not picky about brand of dishwasher liquid, and only buy the pods when they're cheaper than the liquid stuff. Turns out that the sale on the pods of $3.99 each made them cheaper than the liquid in a bottle. The $1/off 2 brought the price down to $3.49 each on two of the packages. The second coupon, $0.20 off, was doubled at the register to $0.40, which brought the third package down to $3.59. So, all told, we saved $1.50 on the store sale, and $1.40 with the coupons, or a total of $2.90, on enough dishwasher chemicals to keep us cleaning dishes for at least two months. We have plenty of space to store the pods, so it was a win for us.

Another recent deal: We like pierogis. A LOT. We eat them at least once a week, usually with kielbasa. It's a quick meal that we can eat on a week night with about 20 minutes of prep. Our preferred brand of kielbasa is Hillshire Farms. We generally stick with Mrs. T's pierogis because that's what is stocked at our local stores. The paper had a coupon for Hillshire Farms $1.00 off any sausage. It also had a coupon for $1.00 off any 3 Mrs. T's pierogis. I went online and printed duplicates of both the coupons. Our local store put both items on sale in the same week. They had both for BOGO, or 2/$4.00 pierogis and 2/$6.00 sausage. I ended up buying 4 kielbasa with 4 copies of the coupon. The pierogi were a little more insane, since I had to find a lowest common denominator of the sale (BOGO) and the coupons ($$ off 3). The math went down like this:
Kielbasa BOGO--savings $3.00 on each pair x 4 = $12.00 saved. In addition, $1.00 coupon x 4 = an additional $4.00 savings. Total spent on Keilbasa: $12.00. Total saved: $16.00.
Pierogi BOGO--savings $4.00 on each pair x 3 pairs = $12.00 saved. In addition, $1.00 coupon on 3 x 2 = an additional savings of $2.00. Total spent on pierogi: $10.00. Total saved $14.00
OR, Total spent: $22.00, total saved $30.00.
.....and whenever we have pierogis and keilbasa, we end up with a leftover meal that I can take for lunch the next day. So, for $22.00, we got 4 dinners for the two of us and 4 additional lunches for me, or a total of 12 meals for $22.00, give or take whatever actual side dishes we make for dinner that night. Not too shabby.

Sure, our freezer looks insane with a huge stack of boxes of pierogi, but they keep well long-term in the freezer and we'll eat them eventually. That also gives us the wiggle room that we don't need to re-stock on something that is a staple of our diet until it goes on sale again, when we can clean up again by stacking store sales and coupons.

There are a zillion places on the web you can learn about couponing. What I have learned is that there's a zillion regional variations in types of deals that stores give, extra incentives that your store might have, and types of coupons that are most prevalent in any given region. Still, taking those tips and meshing them with the reality of our storage, our food usage, and our local stores, I've been able to start saving 30-40% on the regular, with occasional trips that save us upwards of 60%. My grocery orders look a little insane on the belt--like the time we bought six packages of toilet paper, a tube of Neosporin, and six jars of spaghetti sauce, and nothing else. But, it frees up enough cash to make fresh local produce viable within our budget.

I have been spending a bit more than our usual weekly grocery run for the past few weeks, since we're getting up and running and stocking up on staples. I fully expect our grocery bill to shortly come down to between $50 & $100 a week (or even every two weeks) now that we have the storage for dry goods, canned goods AND frozen food. That makes it easy to stock up on meats, too.

I also find that, though this takes up several hours on a Saturday evening and Sunday morning, that's time I'd be spending parked on the couch anyways. I'm just multi-tasking in front of the TV now or spending a few extra hours out of the house when I'd normally be running weekend errands anyways. Because I can cook out of my pantry and my freezer for most of the week, I spend very little extra time at the grocery store during the week, even if I've been lazy and not planned the meals for the week. I don't have to fight the rush-hour just-need-a-few-things lines when I'm tired and hungry and prone to buying anything that looks good, which makes our meal choices more responsible AND more economically sound.

There comes a point in each grocery store marathon where I'm tired, and getting ready to junk the final store list and just get everything I need at this place so I can go home and get on with my other chores. To combat that tendency towards laziness and exhaustion, I do several things:
1) keep a snack handy so I don't start buying junk food in the store. Low blood sugar + grocery shopping = misery.
2) After each store, I inspect the receipt to see how much I've saved. I write the spent / saved total on each shopping list.
3) When I get home, I total everything up from all the stores into one giant spent / saved list. Then I occasionally brag about it on Twitter.

What we'll eventually start doing is transferring that amount of money saved into our savings--towards nice dinners out or towards our next vacation. We're not quite there yet, but that's on our horizon. Brian still thinks I'm nuts, but he's much amused by how much pleasure I take in seeing that savings total go up and up and up.

So, you'll eventually develop your own system, but this is how it works best for us. Hopefully you've found a few tips that will help you join in on the savings party, too. Be careful, though--it's easy to become addicted and even obsessed. However, I'd argue that as long as you're buying things that you genuinely will use, it's a worthwhile obsession to have.