Coupon Queen

Oh yes! Now I am a coupon queen. Getting there anyway. I went shopping this weekend after working on my mini coupon binder for a couple of weeks and it made a difference. With all the BOGO sales I sure did buy a lot of stuff though....

After getting a load of coupons from friends and buying extra papers, I had a lot of work to do, clipping, sorting and filing. My son helped me sort them this time. I made a PowerPoint deck with the number and categories as the title and products as bullet points and printed them as two on a page handouts. I laid these 8 sheets of paper across the foot of the bed and laid the coupons on top of each category so I had a stack on each before I started stuffing them into the binder.

I have 15 categories in my book and because the sheet protectors are wider than the dividers, I put numbered post-it flags at the top of each divider and also printed out and taped an index to the inside of the front cover so I can always see it whenever the binder is open. That is tremendously helpful.

My binder pages are the homemade 3-pocket and also 2 and 4 pocket. Martha Stewart introduced a new Avery product line at Staples and they have 5 x 8 mini-binder sheet protectors divided into 4 pockets. Awesome timing and I got a 20% discount because they had a coupon on this new line (that I had to chase around Chicago to find BTW) These 4-pocket sheet protectors are the perfect size for most coupons. Business card pages also hold tiny ones 4 to a page. I'll admit, it probably did cost a little bit more to set up a small binder vs a big one, but it is so much easier to handle while shopping... and having it really makes the difference between pulling out $5 worth or coupons or pulling $50 worth of coupons. How cool is that!!!

OK, I bet you're wondering how much I saved. At Food4Less I'm not quite sure because the receipt doesn't tell you.

At Dominicks, the receipt calculated 43% ($129.30)but with the catalinas for $10 + $3 next shopping trip, $5 off next purchase of frozen food and free milk, in addition to other coupons, I'm sure it is closer to 50%. I'm not quite a super couponer like Jill Cataldo yet, but I'm getting there. I was stocking up on groceries, not stockpiling BOGO body wash, so I did quite well actually. When you are stocked up and just buy the sales, that is when you get to 70% savings by matching coupons with sales and buying things before you need them. I did buy 3 Secret deodorants at Food4Less though. They were on sale for $1.98 and I had three $1 off coupons making them $0.98 each. That's how you do it, baby.

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Here's a good article on savings by Mary Hunt that is very spot on. I am not quite to baby step 3 yet and have debt to pay off first, but I think that Dave's baby emergency fund should have at least 1 month's expenses rather than $1,000, at least in my case being a single mom. I'm living lean and trying to both save and pay down debt. As long as nothing stupid happens, I will be out of debt (except the house) within a year.