I’m sitting here watching a Tivo’d episode of “Extreme Couponing” where a seemingly very unhappy woman is having a coronary over whether her 60 hours of couponing labor will yeild $1,000 in groceries for $55. Her haul included a ton of sugar-sweetened drinks and sodas, cookies, crackers, cake mix and 28 tubs of cream cheese.
*sigh* No wonder people look at me like I’m nuts when I recommend they try couponing.
I posted on Facebook recently different levels of couponing and savings, but I wanted to elaborate here in a manageable amount of detail how you can save a lot of money with coupons without a ton of effort. Now this is just me, but I save a ton of money every week with coupons and I’ve never spent 60 hours couponing in a month, let alone in a week. That’s craziness!
So let me use an example of my shopping trip to Target yesterday to show you how with minimal effort, you can save a lot of money on the things you buy (things you actually NEED, and I don’t think anyone needs 28 tubs of cream cheese!)
So just for giggles, let’s say you get two copies of the newspaper coupon circulars each week and you scan your mail, e-mail and Facebook for any bargains that happen to fall into your lap. When you go through those coupons and offers, you only clip out the coupons or save the offers for items you KNOW you will use, spending about 15 minutes a week on that minimal amount of effort.
So with that tiny bit of time investment, here’s what you could have done yesterday:
Cottonelle bathroom tissue on sale for $10.99, $1 off peelie coupon on the package. You get two.
Viva paper towels on sale for $10.99, you have a $1 off coupon. You get one package.
Your favorite brand of coffee is $4.99 and NOT on sale, but you’re out, and you have a coupon for $1.50 off 2, so you get two.
Hubby is out of razor blades. A 4-pack is on sale for $5.99 and you have a $4 coupon. Score.
And you’re just about out of laundry detergent (that’s cannot happen) so you pick up a jumbo jug of Tide on sale for $17.99 and you have a $2 off manufacturer coupon plus a $2 off Target coupon (yes, you can use both) from the paper.
So if you had paid regular retail prices for those items, you would have paid about $88.93 plus tax. Not too terrible for a Target run. But hey, you can do better than that, right?
So after sale prices, your total comes to $66.93. You saved $22 – or a whopping 25%! – just for picking up items on sale. But for a return on your time investment of 15 minutes this week plus pulling off a couple of peelie coupons, you also have another $12.50 in savings for your coupons, bringing your total down to $54.43.
As the informercials say, “But wait, there’s more!”
You have another coupon from the paper that gives you a $5 Target gift card back when you spend $25 on Kimberly Clark products (such as Cottonelle and Viva, ahem). And because you “like” Target on Facebook, you also got a link to a printable online coupon that gives you a $10 Target gift card back with a $50 purchase.
And if you pay with your Target Red Card debit card (of which I am a huge, huge fan) you’ll get 5% off your remaining total of $54.43 saving you another $2.72, bringing your final pre-tax total down to $51.71. If you count the $15 you’re getting back in gift cards, you’ll pay $36.71 for $88.93 in stuff you really needed, a savings of 60%. You used only 9 coupons (two of which you got in the store) and you didn’t labor over web sites or other stuff for hours on end.
You can do that, right?
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