Couponing & How I’m Learning the Whole Process of Being Frugal

Couponing & How I’m Learning the Whole Process of Being Frugal

Guest Post By Michelle Cox of Lipstick to Crayons

Not unlike much of the nation, my family has experienced this country’s economic troubles on a personal level. Thankfully, unemployment hasn’t been a challenge that we’ve faced, but my freelance work certainly has seen fluctuations, and my husband’s industry has done some serious belt-tightening, as well. At the same time our income was declining, things like gas and groceries were increasing in cost and my children were getting older and more expensive. Plus, we added a third child to the family right around the time the economy started going south.

Does the concept of “more going out than is coming in” come to mind?

Thus began my “journey toward frugality,” which I’m beginning to chronicle on my site, Lipstick to Crayons. This journey has led me to a learning process that at first seemed overwhelming but has actually been pretty easy because I’ve taken it in small, manageable steps.

Admittedly, I was tempted at the start of this journey to dive in and just about drown myself in a sea of coupon clipping, sale shopping, store hopping, rebate mailing, blog reading, budget cutting, off-brand buying and extravagance trimming. Thankfully, I resisted, because if I’d done that, I would have quit inside of a week. Instead, I decided to take it slow and easy, one step at a time.

Let me tell you how I have been and continue to go about learning to reduce our monthly expenses while not sacrificing our quality of life (and in some ways, I’m improving our quality of life while saving money at the same time).

First, I began reading a lot — not acting upon what I read, just reading and absorbing. I started following a few money saving/couponing blogs that I’d heard about, such as this one, Money Saving Mom and Deal Seeking Mom. I read a helpful series of “Getting Started” posts on The Coupon Project. I printed Ginger’s “coupon lingo” page, as well as any other posts that I found particularly helpful and began filing those posts for future reference. I also clicked through to the sites of bloggers these smart women suggested or mentioned.

I read that Crystal of Money Saving Mom was a fan of the book, “Miserly Moms,” so I ordered a used copy from Amazon and read that, too. Miserly Moms offers 11 Miserly Guidelines, the first of which is “Don’t confuse frugality with depriving yourself.” This really encouraged me to not only keep reading, but to continue on my journey toward frugality. I was starting to believe that I could not only trim our budget significantly, but I could do it without sacrificing some of the things that are really important to us.

After a few months of reading, printing, and highlighting, I was ready to start “doing” some things. The first thing I did was create my coupon binder. There are lots of ideas on how to organize coupons. Simply do a Google search for coupon organization and you’ll find pictures and step-by-step instructions. I like the binder method best, and I made mine very cheaply by using my daughter’s old middle-school zippered binder and baseball card page inserts from Walmart. Other people like a box/envelope system. I will say this: having an organization method is vital to using coupons efficiently.

Once I had my binder ready, I started clipping coupons. Again, I started slow – only clipping coupons from a single newspaper. I’ve graduated now to buying an extra weekend paper or two when I find some really high-value coupons or when I have a little extra time.  After I had a small stash of coupons, blogs like this one really began to come in handy. Each week, Ginger and other frugal diva’s find all the great coupon match-ups – that is: they find the situations in which a manufacturer’s coupon, matched with a store coupon, and sometimes even matched with a store sale, all add up to huge savings. There are bloggers who do match-ups at Walgreens, CVS, Walmart – you name it. And they’ve done all the legwork/research! All I have to do is clip coupons, file them, read their blogs, and make a list of the deals that interest me. Plus, these bloggers also provide lots of links to online coupons – another great source for saving money.

So, after clipping coupons on Saturday and filing them on Sunday, I make lists of the deals that interest me by store, and then I paperclip coupons to the lists and hit the stores as it works in my schedule the following week.

Next, I started giving some thought to how I grocery shop and how I cook. My family already was in the habit of eating most of our meals at home or taking our lunches to school and work, and my grocery bill often reached $300 a week. I justified this by saying, “We seldom eat out – that covers almost all our meals.” But in my previous months’ research, I’d read that other, more frugal women, were feeding families of four or five on half that amount. Again, I began to implement some of the things these women were doing, and I got started by doing the “Eat from the Pantry Challenge.” Then I began doubling or tripling many of my recipes and freezing the meals for later, which is a much less expensive way to cook. I also now shop according to the weekly grocery store ads that arrive in the mail on Monday and build my shopping list based on what each store has on sale and what coupons I have to match-up with those sales. After less than a month of doing this, I now have a nice stockpile of the ingredients I need to make most of the recipes my family loves, so I’m no longer running to the store to pay full price for items necessary to make a spaghetti pie or tacos or whatever else we’re craving.

So, I’m learning slowly but surely, and I’m seeing real results. I’d say I’ve trimmed our grocery/household items/personal care budget by about 25 percent in less than two months, and I’m a coupon newbie. My only regret – that I didn’t learn all of this when I was in my 20s. I cannot imagine how much money I would have saved over the last, um, . .. well, let’s not talk about years.

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Many thanks to Michelle for sharing with us as she starts her journey into couponing.  She gave some great examples of what worked for her and I hope you will take them to heart. Be sure to visit her blog. Michelle is somewhat new to blogging but certainly not to writing. She asked me to give her a deadline! Follow her as she finds her new voice in blogging.

Tagged as: Guest Blogger