Couponing Part 3 of 4: Finding the Deals

So you've got your coupons, they're filed in a way that you can actually find them, now you just have to figure out where to use them.

One of the absolute best sources for finding deals is free – Blogs! I started out on this whole couponing journey because I met the lovely Heather, master mind behind mysweetsavings.com If you live in the Tampa Bay area, lucky lucky you, Heather’s blog is a God send! She posts, usually several times a day, about where to find deals, includes links to online coupons, sneak peaks of up coming sale flyers, and her favorite deals each week at 3 local stores. I think it’s practically imperative to your couponing success that you find a blog, preferably one that’s local to you… or at least local enough to have the same stores as you do in your area… and follow along. If you don’t live near me, don’t worry, this whole couponing thing is huge, there are tons and tons of bloggers sharing and talking about their finds everywhere. Spend a few minutes with Google and I’m sure you’ll stumble across your own little bit of blogging genius! I will forewarn you however, there is an entire couponing language and these bloggers are fluent in it, so if you expect to understand what they're talking about, you'll have to do just a bit of studying to sort it all out. Another Google search for "coupon lingo" will yield plenty of reading material, you can also check out My Sweet Savings' post about that very topic here.

While we’re on the subject of free ways to find deals, there are other free sites like coupontom.com where you can type in the product you want to buy and it’ll tell you where to find a coupon for that product if there is one. So here’s an example of how you can use sites like that: get the flyer from your local grocery store and check out what’s on sale. When you find something you’d like to buy, enter the product name into coupontom.com and see if you've got any coupons in your newspaper flyers that you could use to sweeten the deal. Sites like these are great, but I just don’t have time to sort through every product, so I don’t use them very often.

Okay, so you can navigate the sea of couponing using one or both of the methods above, especially if you find a really great blog to follow. I did that for a while, but I found myself spending hours combing through various blogs, only to find that my store wasn’t having the same sale as the one they referenced, or after looking through the same flyer a million times that my area didn’t get that specific coupon, or that my store’s coupon policy was different than the one across town. I also am very careful to only buy things that we will actually use, even if I can get something else for free. So sometimes I buy things that aren’t one of the super amazing deals the bloggers are all posting about, but I still want to get as much of a discount on it as possible. Enter TheGroceryGame.com After your free 28 day trial, you have to pay for access to this site, but not only have I paid for the membership several times over with the weekly savings I incur, the ease of use, the time it saves me, and the convenience of having it all in one place, for me is totally worth the $15 membership fee I pay every 8 weeks! I’ve signed up for access to just 2 stores’ lists. There are lists for 4 stores available in my area, and I did all 4 during my trial, which worked out well because it helped me see which stores I got the best deals at, but I didn’t like having to compare 4 different lists to see which store had the best deal on a specific item when the difference was usually only marginal anyway and 2 more stops adds quite a bit of time to my shopping trips, so when it was time to start paying for my membership I dropped down to just 2 stores (one grocery and one drug store). Here’s how I manage my 2 lists from the grocery game: Every Sunday I log into thegrocerygame.com and pull up that week’s list for my grocery store. I go down the list, only looking at the first column with the name of the product in it, and mark all the products I NEED to buy. When I get to the bottom of the list I go back up the list looking this time just at the last column with the % saved indicated. If the discount is 60% or more (that’s just my number… yours can be whatever constitutes a “great deal” in your opinion) I see if it’s an item I’d like to try out or something we use on the regular and I would stockpile… if so I mark it too (be careful on this step... this is where you can get in trouble buying things you wouldn't normally buy just because they're a good deal). Next, I choose the option to just show the marked items, hide the header and footer, and print my list. Then, repeat the process with the list for my 2nd store. Lastly, if I marked the same or similar items on both lists (i.e. both stores have deals on diapers) I compare the two to see which is the better deal, and cross the other off the list. Once my lists are ready, I find & clip my coupons from my super slick filing system, paper clip the coupons to my list, mark the order in which I need to buy specific items, if applicable (more on that tomorrow) and head out to the store.

Between the weekly lists on thegrocerygame.com and keeping up with the mysweetsavings.com blog I’m able to find tons of really great deals and save $100 or more every single week on groceries and necessities!

Next up, using your coupons!

Couponing Part 1 of 4: Find the Coupons

Before we get into today’s post I want to preface this series by pointing out that my way of doing this whole couponing thing is certainly not the only way to do it. There are lots of methods, which is partly what contributed to my confusion and the total time suck this thing became when I first got started. What I’m going to show you with this series is the method I devised with the following objectives in mind:


1) The ability to take advantage of the deals that can be had
2) To not spend an exorbitant amount of time on this process… it can take over your life… or at least your Sundays
3) Create a small stockpile of the products we use on a regular basis
4) Save some money

Please notice: saving as much money as possible, getting as many free things as possible, and taking up a new hobby, are not on the list. If those are your objectives, my method will help you get started, but this is sort of the “in moderation” approach, so you’ll miss the mark.

Alright, first things first, find the coupons -

Newspaper: I buy 2 newspapers every Sunday. If you go to wherever you buy your newspapers first thing Sunday morning and find that they’re all out, it’s probably because there’s a die hard couponer who has already gotten to them… lots of (probably most) people who coupon buy more than 2 papers a week. I don’t though for a few reasons 1) I live in a small house and I don’t have the space or desire to store 18 packages of toilet paper & 25 boxes of cereal even if I got them for free 2) to determine how many papers you should buy each week, ideally you would check out which flyers and coupons are going to be in that paper and decide if those particular coupons would be worth the cost of the paper and storing the flyers and frankly, I just don’t have that kind of time in my life, 3) when you’re ready to use the coupons you’ll have to cut out 15 (or how many ever papers you bought) of them… ugh and 4) depending on the store you use them at, there could be a limit to how many of the item you can purchase at a time, in which case you would have to make multiple trips to the store (see objective 2 above). My last little tip about newspapers is that I buy two, not just one, because some of the very best deals to be had are at stores that take 2 coupons on buy one get one free promos (more about that in part 4 of the series) so you have to have at least two coupons for those.

Online: There are lots of places to find coupons online. Redplum.com coupons.com smartsource.com just to name a few. However, to avoid having to store the printed coupons, spend money on ink for my printer (objective 4), and using my time visiting all these sites, I only print out online coupons when I have a specific deal I need them for (finding the deal is part 3 of this series) and am about to head out to pick it up. I will warn you though, sometimes the online coupons aren’t available for very long, so using my method could mean you loose out on some coupons. Also, the vast majority of the time, online sites only allow you to print 2 of each coupon. If you want more than two and have multiple computers in your house, you can print your 2 from each computer though.

Other: You can also find coupons in the stores you shop; most of them will have flyers near the front of the store in a rack. Some stores also have “blinkies”, the coupons in the little machines with the blinking light attached to the shelf in front of the products. “Peelies” are the coupons attached to the outside of the product. CVS has a coupon machine where you scan your CVS card and it spits out coupons. There are magazines with coupons; “All You” is a popular one available at Wal Mart. Lots of places have coupons that print from the register when you check out.

I focus mostly on the newspaper and online for coupons just because it’s easier for me to keep track of what’s available via those sources, but if I’m going into a store to pick something up that I wasn’t planning ahead of time to buy (read: I don’t have a coupon for it *gasp* I can hardly bring myself to do that anymore) then I definitely check the flyers in the front of the store and look for blinkies to try to save at least a few pennies.

Next up: File the Coupons.

Kick-off to a Series on Couponing

When was the last time you clipped a coupon? If it's been a while, I’d like to introduce you to a whole world of people who use coupons to buy stuff for free or almost free. It’s a great big confusing world that I spent at least 2 months being completely overwhelmed by. However, saving $100 or more every week on groceries and household necessities was good motivation for me to jump in and make sense of it all!

Although couponing really has nothing to do with what I usually post to this blog, I’ve decided to do a little 4 part series on it because 1) people have been asking me how I do it 2) I’ve never done a series, so that could be fun, and 3) if I could spare you the frustration I experienced starting out with this thing & make it easier for you to keep some of those hard earned dollars, I will have definitely done my good deed for at least the day… maybe even the week.

If you want to play along, you have a bit of homework... it's easy though, just buy at least 2 newspapers this coming Sunday, the 11th. If you live in the Tampa Bay area, buy the Tampa Tribune (don’t worry, those of you who don’t live in my neck of the woods, this series won’t be applicable just to my area, so go ahead and buy your papers too). We’ll get started Monday and I’ll post one part every day and wrap it all up on Friday.