Sunday, April 10, 2011

One step towards progress..

As I mentioned in my previous blog, I am cutting back financially to get to my goal. I accomplished two things this weekend
  1. Prepped the PT Cruiser to sell. I should spruce it up with some car seat covers and mats for the eye appeal.
  2. Did my first coupon adventure!
Since the prepping of the PT cruiser is not that exciting, I will fill you in on my coupon craze.

I have been prepping since my last blog gathering coupons from my mom, Shoppers Guide, online and bought two Sunday papers for the coupons. Every nap BabyC took I started clipping away and organizing my grocery list. I thought up two questions while prepping for my trip to the store today. What ARE the rules of couponing? How do they get their grocery bill to $6.00 from a large amount?

The first thought was that maybe they outsmarted the cashier and did the same coupons for the same item, but the coupons looked different. Answer - nope, the cashier checks and the scanner knows if you tried to scam them. My example is I had 4 coupons for French's mustard, but they all looked the same. It only took one.

What DID work - I had 4 coupons for cereal. 3 coupons for different cereals and a coupon for some amount off with the purchase of 2 General Mills cereals. I bought the 3 kinds of cereal I had coupons for (plus Giant Eagle had a sale on those) and it took all four coupons.

I guess you just have to learn how to do it properly and that is going to take time. So what was my savings my very first coupon trip?

Total before coupons $194 and change
Scanned the Giant Eagle Card $19.55 in savings
Scanned the coupons (plus it was double coupon week!) $27.30
Grand total: $144.34
Got Fuel perks too which I really don't use. I'm up to $0.90 off a gallon.

So not bad for 68 items. That included baby food, toiletries, diapers and food for the house. My homework now is to plan a better grocery list and figure out the coupon game. This will be my off week though - vacation here I come!

Until next time...

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