A Practical Approach to ‘Extreme Couponing’
Anyone that has even seen a commercial for “Extreme Couponing” has thought to themselves, “I Want to do that!” I mean who wouldn’t want to get hundreds of dollars worth of groceries for pennies. However, even most stay at home parents don’t have thirty-to-forty hours a week to devote to collecting coupons, organizing shopping trips, shopping itself and storing the haul afterwards. If you had time for a job, you’d likely just have a job and contribute to society rather than spending the same amount of time gaming businesses out of goods using their own promotions. If everyone started extreme couponing our economy would eventually bottom out completely-as if it’s not doing badly enough already, or coupons would just cease to exist. Luckily, none of the above means you can’t learn something from TLC’s newest hit reality show. Coupons can save money. The trick is to acquire coupons without working a full workweek, that way everyone has time to do it and businesses still bring in some income.
Use your local paper:
Your local paper is a great resource for coupons, but most people rarely take the time to clip coupons and store them. If you have an extra hour or so a week, you could easily clip coupons for things you regularly buy and throw them in an envelope for later. Another even less time consuming alternative is just to grab a paper just before going shopping and flip through it. Remove the coupons you need for this shopping trip and recycle the rest.
Many large department stores also often have their ads on display stands at the entrance to the store eliminating the need to purchase a paper. Just picking one up can save you money, costs you nothing and takes at most 5 minutes to look through.
Subscribe to stores you shop at often:
The majority of stores have a facebook or at least a newsletter where they regularly offer special promotions or coupons. If they have both that’s even better. If you have a spare 10 minutes search out these things and subscribe. They automatically provide you with coupons and saving you can just print out, no searching, no clipping, and no wasted time.
You can also check to see if your favorite stores have loyalty programs. For example, Fred Meyer offers a rewards card that offers points for money you spend, which earn cash back vouchers, coupons and gas discounts. Those customers that hold rewards cards also sometimes receive special discount flyers. I recently received a 3-month re-usable shopping pass for 10% off everything just for having a card.
Pay attention to in-store coupons:
Many shoppers assume those coupons that are sometimes hung or displayed near merchandise are the same coupons found in the paper. This isn’t always the case. Sometimes you can use both coupons and acquiring them is as easy as picking them up.
Just these three quick and simple steps should provide you with enough coupons to save a decent amount of cash on your shopping, especially if coupled with the basic concepts of shopping around, buy in bulk and during sales. You’ll also do it without having to have an apocalypse store of goods you have no practical place to put and may never use, while supporting the economy.