Frugal Families: Slash Your Grocery Bill with Coupon Mom

My mother is the queen of coupon clipping.  She would even get extra copies of the coupon inserts, scour the circulars for savings and combine coupons, store sales and double and triple coupons to get huge deals on her groceries and toiletries.  This all took a Herculean effort.  While she did save a tidy sum each week and got a boatload of stuff for free, this approach is not for the faint of heart.  Nowadays, another coupon clipping guru has developed an amazing online tool that gets you the savings you want with a lot less work.  Allow me to introduce you to the Coupon Mom.

Coupon Mom is a great way to maximize your savings while reducing the effort spent clipping those coupons.  I call this targeted coupon shopping.  You can visit her website to get the specifics, but here is a quick summary of how it works:

1. Save your coupon inserts and write the date of it on the front in marker.  There are three companies that provide these inserts each week:  Redplum, Procter & Gamble (P&G), and Smartsource.  Just keep doing this each week and find a nice place for your coupon insert stack.
2. Peruse the couponmom website to get the week’s deals by store and state.
3. Select the deals you want and you can email the list to yourself.
4. The deals will list the specific coupon to use by date and coupon insert.  You simply gather the appropriate insert, and find and clip the coupons you want.

In fine frugal fashion, CouponMom.com is free and is paid for by advertising.  They maintain a database of coupons by date and match the store sales with current, unexpired coupons.  With Coupon Mom, you only clip the coupons you want and you reap bigger savings by using the coupons when the products are on sale.

Still skeptical?  Being an Industrial Engineer by trade, I conducted a personal test to assess the viability of this project.  My time study revealed the following:  It took less than 5 minutes to browse through the site and generate a list of the deals I liked for 3 stores (Giant, Walgreen’s and CVS).  In fact, I did it on my smartphone while watching TV.  Once I printed out my emailed list, it took me 10 minutes to go through the coupon inserts and find the coupons I wanted for one store.

With the kiddies in bed, I proceeded to my test store, Giant, that night with my banana, water bottle, CouponMom list and coupons in hand.   I scanned the aisles and was able to get most of the items I wanted and check out in 30 minutes.  Things were definitely much faster without the kids.  I was able to find the sale products and match them with my coupons without too much trouble.

Here are my stats for this quick trip:  I bought 19 items, which retailed for $70.98.  I ended up paying $38.69, just a little more than half the price.  Most of these items are loss leaders, or the items that are on sale that week, such as the buy one get one free pork chops and the 10 for $10 specials.  However, I was also able to use 3 coupons in order to get shampoo for $0.89, a free box of bandages, and four large boxes of brand name cereal for $1.75 each.

The end result: for an extra 15 minutes worth of work, I saved $5 in coupons.  That’s like earning $20 an hour!  I also saved time preselecting the items I wanted for sale without having to bother scouring over the circular and comparing prices.  CouponMom makes coupon clipping worth the effort.

This article appeared originally as a blog post for the Frugal Families blog on Chesapeake Family in October 2010.

Starting an Allowance

I always envisioned starting an allowance for my little guy when he turned eight.  This was not a magic number, but I figured he’d be reading, doing math and prepared to handle an allowance.  When he entered First Grade, he would ask for a dollar here and a dollar there for the latest thing at the School Store that his other buddies were buying.  It became clear that an allowance would enable him to have “purchasing power” without him henpecking me for days on end.  I decided to accelerate my allowance plan two years early.

I started with a low dollar amount, $2 every week, and explained to him that just like his father; he would get paid on Friday, after school.  He loved the idea and the best thing is that he never badgers me for money anymore.  The monetary amount is small enough that he really has to save in order to buy a big ticket item.

Establishing an allowance has really allowed my son to have choices, learn about budgeting and experiment with money in a safe environment.  For more tips on starting an allowance for money savvy kids, check out my article in my Mothering Matters column on Patch.

Our Christmas 2010 Memories

Naked potty training..... Saltines.... Two trips to Patient First... The poor boy dry heaving every hour :(. Twittering... Melted fake thin mints..... Making truffles... The lunar eclipse... Abuela Mati visits... We all camp out at home except for my jaunts to the stores and doctor... Sturgeon Train Garden with the Witts... Getting our Christmas tree and "family portrait"... Operation Cookie Drop.. A new primary doctor??  Raccoon eyes...  Another one down for the count...  passing the "bowl"... Biscuit tosses his cookies...  Zhu zhu pets and Mario Galaxy... sandwiches for Christmas dinner...  Late Christmas Cards and a salvaged visit to see family for New Year's instead.  Whew....