How to Coupon in a Practical Way

How to Coupon in a Practical way and Save Your Family Money

I want to do a blog post about how to coupon in a practical way. I’m not an extreme couponer, I can’t show you how to get $800 in groceries for $30 or fill your entire garage with free stuff. But I have learned a couple of tricks that can save you a couple hundred dollars a month on groceries.

I have to give some credit to my sister in law first and foremost. Up until about a month ago, couponing was a useless waste of time to me. She sat down with me for about an hour and changed the way I grocery shop completely. This was after spending the evening digging through her VERY full cupboards when I wanted a snack. Once she started couponing, she had to find additional pantries and I’ll say, that only a few weeks into couponing, I already need a chest freezer and extra pantry space. This is coming from not knowing what we were having for dinner just a few weeks ago.

Ok, let’s get started.

Before my SIL sat down with me, couponing seemed like a waste of time to me.  Why’s that? Well, because like many American families we are in that hard place where we don’t make enough money to make ends meet but too much to get any help. So our budget has been tight, painfully tight, for years. We got into the habit of buying off brand products and not buying anything frivolous. We also didn’t eat very healthy because, in general, healthy is very expensive and un-healthy is not.

I did a price comparison about a year ago to prove this point. A bag of apples at my local grocery store (on sale that week) had 12 apples inside and cost $5.99. A box of snack cakes (at least 10 varieties to choose from) with 8-12 snacks cakes inside costs $.99-$1.99. You do the math.

I would love to feed my children healthy foods vs. snack cakes but the money only goes so far. Practical couponing has helped stretch my dollars to the point that we can now eat healthier because we are saving money and using that money to spend a little more on the healthy stuff.

It’s difficult to justify using a a coupon for a name brand product when the price (even with the coupon) doesn’t beat the price of an off brand product, even if the store doubles coupons. Often you have to purchase more than one item and sometimes as many as three or four items to even get the coupon savings.

Example: I have a coupon for $1.00 off 2 boxes of cereal. They cost $3.39 each at my local store. The store only doubles coupons for $.50 or less so the coupon doesn’t double so it’s only worth $1.
The Math: $3.39 x 2 = $7.80 – $1.00 = $6.80 / 2 = $3.40 each but I have to spend $7.80 of my grocery budget to get them at that price. I can get one bag of store brand cereal with almost twice as much cereal inside (which will do for the time frame of our grocery shopping — 1 week) for less than $4. So you can see how this coupon is not a good deal and on a really tight budget, every penny counts so an additional $3 is no good.

So how do you get good deals with coupons?  Why even bother finding them, cutting them out, keeping up with them, etc? Well let me tell you how.

You combine your coupon with your local grocery store’s weekly specials. That’s the trick. Let’s see an example.

Using the same coupon:
1.) The store you are shopping at offers that cereal on a buy one get one free weekly special. (Publix’s does this all the time with all sorts of stuff). So now you are getting both boxes of cereal for $3.39, now apply your $1 off coupon and you’re getting two boxes of cereal for $2.29. Add a store coupon to that and you’ll get the cereal for even less. Now you’re talking about name brand cereal for $1.20 a box or less.

2.) The store you are shopping at offers that cereal in a 10 for $10 weekly special. So now you’re getting two boxes of cereal for $2, now apply your $1 off coupon and you’re getting the same two boxes of cereal for $.50 (even better, if your coupon is for $.50 off one box and your store doubles coupons you’re getting the cereal for FREE!! )

That’s my kind of deal. If I can do that five times in one trip, I can buy my kids apples instead of snack cakes with the money I saved.

There are many ways to successfully coupon. Everyone has to find their method. My SIL does it differently than I do, but listening to her tell me how she does it and putting it into practice helped me figure out what worked for me.

So here’s mine:

I have a Kroger, a Publix and a Walmart in my area so those are the stores I work with. The first thing I did was find out what each of the store’s policies were on coupons and ad matching and what day of the week their weekly ads come out. I also registered on all three of their websites to receive coupons and notifications of the deals they offer.

Our Sunday paper always has the coupon books, SmartSource and Red Plum and sometimes some bonus books as well like the PnG Saver. Our local paper offers a double edition of the coupons for $1 off the cost of two papers. So basically you get two papers, two sets of coupons but pay $3.99 instead of $5 (cost of two Sunday papers). I also joined coupons.com and registered at several of the name brand sites that we enjoy (like hormel, campbells, etc.) to receive notification of when they have coupons and deals. Coupon.com allows you to print coupons directly from their site. If your Sunday paper doesn’t have the inserts go to www.redplum.com and www.smartsaver.com and www.pgeveryday.com to get printable versions of the coupons.

I clip the coupons and have organized them in a binder. See the video where I explain my coupon binder – click here –

I enjoy the clipping and organizing of the coupons (soothes my ocd, I think) but my SIL just holds on to the inserts and finds the coupons she wants to use as she needs them. For the next step there are two options. You need to match up the store deals with the coupons. You can do this manually by collecting your coupons, sorting them and then going through the ads and the coupons you have in front of you. Or, you can go to sites like www.southernsavers.com / www.couponmom.com / www.couponcabin.com and click each of the stores you visit to find which weekly store specials have matching coupons.

Thursday is my coupon planning day. The Kroger and Walmart ad comes out on Sunday and the Publix ad comes out on Thursdays, so on Thursdays I have access to all three of their weekly specials. I like to have the physical paper ads in front of me. The first thing I do is go through the ads with my sharpie and circle the items that are on sale that my family likes to eat or use.

Then I get out my coupon book and dig through and see if I have coupons that match up with the ads. When I find coupons that match up I pull them out and put them in the front of my book and mark an asterisk on that ad, which I had already circled.

After I’m done with that, I make our menu for the week and from the menu I create our shopping list. At the bottom of the shopping list I make sure to list staples like bread, milk, cheese, etc.

I then go through the shopping list and mark which store to buy what items at (if they are on sale and I have a matching coupon to maximize savings) I also mark an asterisk on the items I have a coupon for that the stores don’t have on special. $1 off is better than full price if the store brand is not less expensive. And then we go shopping and watch the savings add up.

The other thing I did was google meat markets in (your city’s name here) or butchers in (your city’s name here) and found some incredible deals on buying meat in bulk. We bought 45 lbs of chuck roast, chicken, ribs, and pork – enough to make 22 meals for our family and saved $40 by buying from the butcher.

So last week, using these methods (took me about 2 hours of preparation) I saved our family $108. We spent $256 and brought home $364 in groceries. That included 4 free soups and 4 free tubes of Crest toothpaste. Now that I’ve shown the simple idea of finding coupons to match up to the store specials I can see how people are getting name brand products for next to nothing.

I hope this makes sense and helps. Now. Go. Clip, organize and save your family some money!!!!!   Good Luck!!!!