How to Extreme Coupon – Do’s and Don’ts

“The recession has affected every aspect of American life,” proclaims USA Today in one of its articles. Fewer people are moving, couples are delaying marriage, and more people are working at home than at the office.

Food prices are rising too—a reality that is not lost on most Americans who have gone into a mad frenzy to cut down their grocery bills. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the revival of interest in a previously much-ignored facet of American shopping: coupons.

Grocery coupons, from once becoming a waste of trees, have all of a sudden become a goldmine for bargain warriors out to spend their money anywhere but at the supermarket. In TV land, no other show has single-handedly brought the lowly grocery coupon to such heights of popularity and glory as the TLC reality series Extreme Couponing.

Each week, millions of Americans tune in to Extreme Couponing to watch “everyday” Americans demonstrate the most outrageous things they do to save, such as diving in dumpsters for coupons or filling a two-car garage with boxes of deodorant and other coupon-sponsored steals.

However, for all the realism it supposedly presents, we at Recessionitis can’t help but raise our eyebrows. Seriously, who buys 125 boxes for each type of pasta in the name of great value? More importantly, why would you even do that?

Extreme couponing coupled with smart shopping—that’s what we’re all about. In this guide, we’ll show you realistic and creative ways of putting coupons to good use.

Collect your coupons

It needs no mentioning that coupons are the building blocks to extreme couponing. Newspaper inserts are a good way to source coupons. If you go online, you’ll find plenty of printable coupons from coupon websites, or from manufacturer and product websites (even Facebook pages). To score free coupons, look to your local supermarket (or your mailbox) for coupon booklets, “peelies” (coupons attached to product packages), and coupons inside the products you buy.

Do

• Subscribe to your local Sunday papers and online coupon websites to build your coupon stash. Look for a local Sunday paper to subscribe to that contains the most complete coupon inserts. Online, websites such as SmartSource, Coupon Sherpa, RedPlum, and Coupons.com offer plenty of printable coupons. You may also want to subscribe to shopping magazines like All You. Aside from having lots of pages devoted to coupons and great deals, All You provides plenty of tips for beginners and pro bargain hunters alike.

• Invest in an affordable monochrome printer. A cheap black and white laser printer can save you hundreds of dollars in the long run, especially since you’ll be printing of coupons.  Something like HP’s LaserJet Pro P1102w will do a good job of that.

Don’t

• Rummage through other people’s trash looking for discarded coupons. That’s a little too desperate, and a bit unsanitary.

• Sneak into your neighbors’ lawns and steal their Sunday paper inserts. For very obvious reasons.

Organize to simplify

Going through coupons you need for your upcoming shopping trip can be time consuming if you don’t organize. There are a myriad ways to do this, and documenting all will probably merit a separate discussion. You don’t need to organize according to the Dewey Decimal System; as a cardinal rule, choose an organization method that’s simple and works for you.

Do

• Go logical. You can organize your coupons according to inserts, printable coupons, and loose coupons. From there, you can further sort by categories (e.g., canned goods, frozen items, condiments/dressings & spices, etc.).

• Look for inexpensive ways to sort coupons. You don’t need to buy a filing cabinet when a simple cardboard box can house your coupon collection. An accordion file you can write on is also a great way to organize coupons: Smead’s Ultracolor Expanding Files have 12 pockets with tab inserts that you can label separately.

Don’t

• Go collecting coupons like a mad stamp collector. Save yourself the headache of having to rifle through pile after pile of coupons: clip and keep only coupons for items that you really need and discard the rest.

Don’t make couponing a full-time job

“Time is money,” so the adage goes. Spending all of it obsessing over coupons is definitely not spending time wisely. If you’ve been watching Extreme Couponing, then you’ve heard the story of one couponer who devotes 70 hours a week on her hobby. Or the other one who spends more than 4 hours raiding the supermarket aisles—and another 2 hours checking out. You don’t want to be that person.

Do

• Set boundaries for how much time you’re going to spend. One to two hours a day is understandable. More than 30 hours a week is, honestly, a little worrisome, and may be bordering on the obsessive.

• Spend most of your free time doing other more productive schemes instead. Like engaging in a part-time or freelance job, for one, which earns you more hourly compared to what you save couponing.

Don’t

• Spend 5 hours per day preparing Excel spreadsheets to organize your virtual stash of coupons. Again, remember what we said about not treating this as an obsession. Let that be your guide.

Do you really need 300 bottles of hot Sauce? (Or, go easy on the stockpile)

Extreme couponing dictates that to make the most of a single-item coupon, you need to buy lots of one product. While that’s a great rule to live by for most grocery items (such as toilet paper, laundry soap, and other household cleaners), it certainly does not apply to all—most especially to whole foods and other goods that spoil easily, like meat, dairy products, and fruits and veggies.

That said, purchasing a dozen per transaction is acceptable; hoarding and clearing an entire supermarket’s stock of detergent is not cool (and will only earn you dagger looks and death curses from other shoppers).

Also consider that grocery items will take up space. Some very hard-core extreme couponers make it their life’s work to build stockpiles that can sustain the entire population of a small island, but do so at the expense of leasing more floor space.

Do

• Buy only what you need. Learn to distinguish what items to buy in large quantities and what items to pass on. Factor your or your family’s consumption into the equation.  1,500 rolls of deodorant will last you more three lifetimes, we reckon. Surely you’re not planning on staying around that long!

• Mind products with expiration dates. Foods go bad and medicines lose their potency after a certain time. To make sure that you aren’t mindlessly throwing money away, make sure that you move the newest items at the back of your pantry so you go through the older stocks first.

• Think about the space you’ll need to store the items. Unless you’ve got extra room to spare, think twice about building your toilet paper­-and-deodorant empire.

Don’t

• Buy grocery items you or your family will never use. Some extreme couponers clear entire aisles buying stuff they don’t need and will never use in this lifetime. Most just buy out of a sick, perverse desire to get back at the system. We share the same sentiments, but really, you don’t need to go that far to teach the Company Store a lesson.

Manage your expectations

If you are a fan of Extreme Couponing (the show), it can be easily disheartening how little you actually save, compared to the hundreds of dollars the pros on TV are able to achieve. Don’t throw yourself a pity party. Know that television shows often play for the ratings game, and that anything can be easily manufactured or sensationalized.

Some moderate couponers even argue that due to the extreme couponing phenomenon, most drugstores, supermarkets, and manufacturers have begun wising up by reducing discounts on coupons. Some stores no longer allow store coupons and manufacturer’s coupons to be used on one item.

Do

• Filter the information you get. There are a couple of good points you can pick up from Extreme Couponing, such as maximizing coupon use through stacking (i.e., using more than one kind of coupon per product to bring the price lower). Make a note of these and see if you can apply these and more tips the next time you go grocery shopping.

Don’t

• Believe everything you see. Extreme couponing taken to the nth level of extremeness—that very well describes the exploits of people featured on Extreme Couponing. While that doesn’t mean won’t be able to get the same results J’aime or Joanie the coupon diver have achieved, be realistic about what you can really achieve. Paring down a $1,000 bill down to $6 is indeed amazing, but that’s far removed from reality.

Mind your health too

High-sodium snack chips, pancake syrup and frozen waffles, sugar-loaded cereals and drinks, microwave dinners. These are most often the items you see featured in coupons. Not exactly items you’d see at the bottom of the food pyramid. Would you really want you or your family subsisting on these kinds of food regularly? By buying these items in unreasonably large amounts, you could be setting yourself up for a world of cardiovascular hurt.

Do

• Make smart choices. Although rare, coupons for fresh and natural grocery items are not impossible to find. As much as possible, go organic or go for healthier options when coupon hunting.

Don’t

• Compromise your or your family’s health. Just because it’s cheap and affordable, doesn’t mean it’s good for you. Make sure you still prioritize wellness above everything else. After all, if you don’t have your health, you really don’t have anything, do you?

The bottom line

It’s hard not to be lured by the magic of grocery coupons. But being focused too much on what you can save might lead you to ignore what you’re actually spending on. The ink, paper, and energy you consume printing out coupons, the extra copies of Sunday papers you buy just to get multiple coupon inserts, the gas money you spend for the two pick-up trucks you need to bring with you to the grocery store—if you add these all up, you’ll realize the $100 you save weekly doesn’t really amount to much in the long run.

The whole point of using coupons is to save. Don’t make it anything other than what it is by turning it into a consuming hobby—or worse, an obsession.

One comment on “How to Extreme Coupon – Do’s and Don’ts”

1. Brenda Elizabeth on August 4, 2011 at 7:15 am said:

   Awesome!

   Log in to Reply

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