The ABCs of Coupon Shopping
I am a shopping dolt. If there is a way to use coupons to make things cost more, I can do it. But my friend, Faith, can bring home car-load after car-load of products from CVS, Target, and Walgreen’s (Wags) using coupons and either:
- spend very little money
- spend no money at all
- spend no money and also bring home gift cards given to her by the very store where she “bought” all those products jamming up her pantry!
I know! Sounds illegal, huh?
Well, there are tricks to this “coupon magic” and Faith shares them freely with everyone she knows. She even takes her friends to the store and shows them how. And now, for the seventy-leventh time, she is helping me.
First and foremost, you must, must, must start buying the Sunday paper. At least one copy, more is better. If you have a big family like me, you might want to buy three or four copies. You don’t need the daily paper, just the Sunday. Save all the coupon inserts.
Next, you want a printer for your online coupons.
Hot Coupon World is the place to start. Before grocery shopping, check their forums. Select the grocery stores link. Your grocery store is likely listed. The current (and past) weekly ad and the coupon match-ups for online coupons and the coupon inserts from your Sunday paper will be there.
When you are buying things other than grocery and drugstore items go to SlickDeals. It’s a great place to do research or find deals.
The sites to check for Walgreen’s, CVS, and Target deals are:
While you can get most of the same info on Hot Coupon World, these sites tend to whittle the info down to just the really cheap deals and free stuff.
You need to organize your shopping trips by deals. It’s a different way of shopping. You can’t walk into a drugstore and just shop your list and check out all in one go. Pretty much, each deal needs to be a separate transaction. Start small, one or two deals for your first several trips to the stores. Analyze what you want to do. Write it down, attach your coupons to your list with a paper clip.
When you come back home, study what you got, the coupons you used, the whole thing. It’s a whole new skill you are trying to learn. You gotta study. Sorry!
When deals are rock bottom or free STOCK UP! It doesn’t matter whether you NEED an item or not. If it’s something you will use, buy lots of it when it’s cheap or free.
And when a blog says HOT COUPON then you need to print it right away… before all the available prints are gone.
I’ve written a few posts detailing some of my experiences with coupon shopping (with Faith’s help). You can find them here, here, here, here, here and here.
Really, you don’t have to read all of those to learn how to coupon shop, but there is some good info there and lots of links to some of the good coupon deal sites.
It has helped me a great deal to go to Money Saving Mom and read (and re-read) her articles about it.
I’ll leave you with these two thoughts.
- The deals that work out best are those where you can combine a manufacturer’s coupon, a store coupon and a good sale price.
- When you have a coupon that is a buy one, get one free, and the store is having a buy one, get one free sale, BINGO, both items are free!
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