The Simple Coupon
Trent at The Simple Dollar just wrote an article about how clipping coupons could be a bad use of time. I’m going to wholeheartedly disagree. You have to know how to use the coupons and you have to be patient for the coupon/sales cycle to reach a climax, but there are far too many times when my own wife has gained a very productive savings at the store and that we’ve been able to save big by using them. I wrote about two instances in the past here and here.
There are several things involved that make clipping coupons useful for the frugal shopper:
- Know the coupons you have. This means getting organized enough to have the coupons in one place and organized by category. When you clip coupons this week take a moment to look at older coupons to weed out expired coupons.
- Know where to find the coupons. We buy an ‘Entertainment’ coupon book every year. It is a fund raiser book that our local school district runs. That coupon book is usually $15.00 or so and it has $5.00 off coupons for each month of the year to our local Safeway. That means that we save the cost of the book over 4 times. We also only subscribe to the Sunday paper so as to save on the subscription to the Rocky Mountain News. On top of all of that we have friends and family that give us their coupon inserts from the paper so that we can save more if the coupon is good - we’ve got duplicates. Otherwise we recycle what’s left over.
- Know the price fluctuations of the items you buy. Some products go on special right before the coupons expire which means that by holding onto the coupon from this Sunday’s paper you’ll save money in October. A lot of money sometimes. You have to be aware of the cycle that comes into place.
- Know what sites you can use keep up with coupons and deals. The two blog posts I wrote before that I linked to above reference two different web sites that help coupon clippers save money. One of them monitors store prices and savings cycles and one of them monitors stores for random sales that coupon clippers have been able to find and shares the savings that were made.[check out refundcents.com and couponmom.com]
You could consider the coupon simple and often useless, or you could consider the coupon + time + strategy as being part of your frugal arsenal. Trent likes the coupons and considers them worthwhile because he’s already relaxing while clipping them, but I consider the coupons to be a valuable part of what my family does to combat paying more than we need to.
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