Punny Money’s Grand Coupon Experiment, Part 3
Author: Nick
Category: Money
Topics: coupons, food, frugality
I’m sure everyone’s eager for an update on the Grand Coupon Experiment since the last one was almost two weeks ago. I’ll skip the product-by-product breakdown and jump right to the big statistics.
Grand Coupon Experiment Net Savings: +$5.29, -50 minutes
That savings total reflects the use of coupons from three weeks of Sunday newspaper inserts as well as some from our local Safeway’s weekly circular. It also takes into account the cost of the newspapers themselves. The time total went mostly toward the act of clipping, though some of it reflects the additional time it takes to find and compare product prices with and without coupons.
So over three weeks and after nearly an hour of time, I’ve saved a little over five bucks clipping coupons. Am I happy about my progress so far? Not particularly. At the current rate, I’ll only end up saving $90 over the course of a year. Some may think that’s a pretty decent chunk of change, but when you factor in the estimated 14 hours it will take me to clip and use those coupons, that $90 doesn’t look like much. In fact, I recently calculated that $90 is the going rate for just one hour of my personal time. Using that figure, and assuming I spend 14 hours on couponing each year, that means I’ll actually lose the time equivalent of $1,260 a year!
Of course, that’s just my take on it, and perhaps I’m overcomplicating things with calculations of money and time. And again, maybe there’s more I can do to maximize my coupon savings while minimizing the amount of time spent chasing those savings.
So why is it that I’m not one of the many people saving thousands of dollars a year by using coupons? The simple answer is that my highly frugal nature has transcended the need for coupons, but allow me to elaborate.
Why Coupons Don’t Work For Some People (Like Us)
- Time vs. money; winner is time. As someone who highly values his free time, the amount of money I save using coupons is small compared to the amount of time it takes to find and clip those coupons in the first place. I might be able to cut down on the time requirement by using a deal website like The Coupon Mom to let me know when I should cut the coupons, but even that doesn’t look like it would translate into enough time savings to justify the meager money savings.
- Store brands. We are almost always happy with the quality of a store brand of product compared to the more expensive name brand version. Sure, coupons might make it worth buying a box of Kellogg’s Froot Loops over a bag of Store’s Fruit Circles… but what if the Fruit Circles go on sale? Ninety-nine percent of the time, a store brand’s sale price beats even an on-sale, couponed name brand item. And for non-food items like toothpaste and shampoo, the savings between store and name brand can be even more pronounced.
- Food habits. We love our fruits and veggies, and they can easily account for a third of our total grocery bill. You probably won’t find coupons for fresh produce in your coupon booklets. The same goes for things like meat, milk, eggs, and other staples. Coupons don’t apply to about half our grocery purchases simply because they’re not items for which coupons are made.
- It’s just the two of us. One day, when my wife gives me the nine children I’d like to have, coupons may play a bigger role in our lives. But for now, there’s only so much we need to eat and use, and that helps keep our grocery bills down even without coupons.
Now if you’ve been following the responses to the Punny Money article that started this experiment, you’d know that coupons work wonders for plenty of people. Does that mean they’re doing something right that I’m completely missing? Not really. It just means we’re in different situations.
Why Coupons Work Great For Some People
- Discipline. It takes a certain mindset to become a hardcore coupon saver. This could involve buying stacks of newspapers for a particularly attractive offer, ordering coupons online, and designating entire rooms at home for cataloging and storing coupons. I could never be more than a casual coupon clipper, but plenty of folks take a pair of scissors to their Sunday paper inserts like a surgeon removing an appendix made of gold.
- Big families. When you have a family of four, five, or twenty-three to feed, clothe, and bathe, coupons can help you stock up on supplies at great prices. Whereas it may not be practical for a two-person household to load a pantry full of 50-cent toothpaste, it’s a logical decision for Mommy, Daddy, Timmy, Katie, Billy, Amanda, Big Joe, Grandma Patty, and Spot to buy just about everything in bulk and use coupons to maximize savings.
- Food habits and brand names. Coupons are also great for filling the pantries and fridge with processed foods and name brand items. While we rarely see a coupon of use to us, some people may go through a Sunday coupon circular and use 80% of the contents.
- Time vs. money; winner is money. After years of experience tearing through thousands of pages of coupons, a few people may get that time-to-money ratio down to something much more worthwhile. If you can walk away with $20 in coupon savings with just ten minutes of work, then you’ve reached a level of coupon mastery that will probably elude me forever.
I’d like to welcome all the readers coming here from a Yahoo! Group which seems to have linked to the original Punny Money coupon article. The group is moderated, so I’m not sure what was said to bring everyone here, but it seems to have worked! I’ve been asked to respond to a few of your comments, so that’s just what I’ll do.
Angie says…
…when things (I use) are on sale, I buy as many as I can. In the past 2 days, I bought $524.54 worth of groceries for only $51.78. I buy meat in bulk for 1/4 of retail from a local farmer, and won’t have to step in a store for 2-3 months unless I want to. I do not own [Faye] Prosser’s book, I did my own research and figured it out.
Wow! I don’t think $500 worth of groceries would even fit in my tiny car. I’m a huge fan of farmers’ markets myself, though our local farmers lean toward produce rather than meat.
I’m also glad that you mentioned you figured out the path to coupon savings yourself. While Faye Prosser’s book sounds like a great read, you can probably find just about all the information you need to duplicate her results for free on the internet or in a public library. But at the same time…
Muriel says…
I would like to let you know that I have taken Faye Prosser’s class and absolutely loved it. She taught us how to save at least 50% or more off of our grocery bill. For that, I am very grateful to her. She is a great inspiration to those of us who know her!!!!
A good deal of the comments received in the last 48 hours have been less a defense of coupons and more a defense of Faye Prosser. It was not my intention to offend Ms. Prosser or her many fans who have benefitted from her teachings. I merely intended to pose an alternative point of view and to suggest that coupons may not be right for everyone. It sounds like she’s helped a lot of folks with their shopping finances, though I hope you’ll also consider my own arguments to see if coupons are the best option available to save you money on groceries.
Oh, and I’d like to ask a couple of you to take another look at the title of the site. It’s Punny Money. Punny means “funny,” so some of my remarks in the original article may have been satirical. I’m a little saddened that I need to point that out, but I guess there was no coupon in last Sunday’s paper for a sense of humor. (That’s another joke, by the way. Humor is free!)
Laura says…
I only shop at stores that double my coupon and then really stock up when the stores have “triple coupon days.”
After moving from Baltimore to a suburb of Washington a few months ago, we noticed that the price of food was just about the same in the two areas. We also noticed that double- and triple-coupon stores were few and far between. So while the shelf prices may be similar in both areas, coupons might make a bigger difference in one place than in another.
Heather says…
By all means, feel free to spend $100 a week on groceries. I’ll keep my coupons, thank you, and feed my family of 5 for less than $20 a week.
I’ve done all this talking about how much I saved using coupons and I never once mentioned how much I spend without them. A quick look through Quicken indicates that we average about $15 a week on all grocery items (food and non-food) for the two of us. That’s not quite up to par with 5 people for $20, but I should probably mention that I’ve been told I eat like three people.
jo says…
If the coupon is for a item you do not use and by using it, it will make the item free, why not get the item and donate it to the food bank. Just because you personally do not use it dont mean that NO ONE uses it. I feel sure that someone enjoyed the 24 cans of bush baked beans and the 48 boxes of kraft mac and cheese I donated to the food bank even though we dont eat either of them. I paid a total of 1.39TOTAL for BOTH THESE CASES food.
Very good point, jo. Coupons can do more than help you and your own family. I am curious, however, as to how long it took to clip all those coupons. Maybe I just don’t have the technique down yet, but it would take me a good long time to accumulate such a big pile. Still, that’s quite an accomplishment! (And now I’m hungry for baked beans. Wish I had a coupon…)
Angela Henley says…
I would be CURIOUS to see your shopping list for 1 week, maybe you could challenge a SEASONED couponer to get the same items you do at a lower cost USING COUPONS? that would be more fair than just taking a hand full of coupons on a one time shopping trip and then making a judgement call………
I guess it would be a little more fair if I extended this experiment a little longer. As for the challenge, I’m sure a seasoned couponer could easily match or surpass my system for grocery savings… at least before taking into consideration the cost of our time. For now, I’ll just have to be satisfied with being my own challenger. Can I find a balance between coupon savings and the time investment needed to acheive that savings? We shall see…
Brian says…
I enjoyed your turbulent comments and I think you’d like a short article I wrote called Following Punny Money’s Grand Coupon Experiment.
Thanks again, Brian, for pointing me to The Coupon Mom. Once I have a few weeks of Sunday circulars saved up, I’ll be sure to put that site to the test. I especially love one of your article’s comments: “Perhaps, if time is money, and if coupons are too, the experiment will prove that that the Sunday circulars are one commodity that college students, home makers, and non-profit organizations can trade for necessities.” Trading piece of paper for things of real value? What a crazy idea, but it just might work!
Pamela says…
You have provided an excellent place for all the people who have had very POSITIVE results from clipping their coupons to tell our stories.
I’m glad to be of service! When I first started seeing all these comments pour into the coupon post, I almost made a move for the “lock post” button. But I quickly remembered that comments are there for a reason, so I encourage everyone to continue to share their thoughts (whether for or against) on coupons in either this article or the original.
I wish I could reply to all of your comments, but there are so many and they keep on coming! But that’s great because I love reading them, and I’m sure Punny Money’s readers will appreciate the additional insights you have provided into the world of couponing.
Stay tuned to Punny Money in the coming weeks and months as I continue the Grand Coupon Experiment. Feel free to send me your couponing tips or comment here with them so I can be an awesome couponer, too!
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28 Responses »
1.
Meredith
May 31st, 2006 at 4:47 am
What a great analysis!
2.
Mike
May 31st, 2006 at 9:35 am
When we first went shopping at Giant when we moved to Maryland, we bought $200 worth of groceries for $90. We used $10 worth of coupons (that we just had without clipping) and the rest was using their Buy 1 Get 1 type deals. Don’t underestimate the power of Buy 1 Get 1’s!
3.
J.D. @ Get Rich Slowly
May 31st, 2006 at 10:07 am
*sigh*
I still think that you’re making this way too hard. I started writing a coupon entry in response, but my wife put the kibosh on it. “I’m the Coupon Queen around here,” she said. She’s promised to co-author something about coupons soon.
What else are you doing while your cutting out coupons? When my wife clips coupons, she’s chatting with me or watching TV or doing something else she’d be doing anyhow. There’s no real time lost. It’s one of those things — like knitting — that she’s able to do while multitasking.
I’ll grant that food habits can play a huge role in whether coupons are useful to people or not. The number of people in a family? Not so much. We’re a two-person household, too, yet we save $25+/month with coupons. (I’d actually be curious to compare our total grocery costs with your total grocery costs and then look at the percentage saved; maybe they’re similar, I don’t know.)
But, really: you’re still making this way too hard.
4.
Nick
May 31st, 2006 at 10:34 am
J.D., I look forward to reading the response from you and your wife. Since my primary hobbies all involve the computer, coupon clipping takes me away from the keyboard. I could probably find something else to do in the meantime, but I doubt it would be very constructive.
Like I said, in recent months, we’ve averaged around $15/week for groceries, or a little over $60 each month. That’s $60 for about $200 worth of groceries. Could we get that amount down even further with coupons? Maybe a little bit, and that’s why I’m going to continue with this experiment a while longer. Should I expect my grocery bill to approach $0 if I start using coupons more aggressively? Maybe. Will I be happy if my grocery bill goes down to $0? Sure! But will I still be happy if it takes three hours of hunting and clipping each month to accomplish that $60 savings? At $20/hour, I could achieve even more savings by working overtime instead. Then again, clipping coupons might be a little more fun. Or maybe I could pay somebody double minimum wage to do my clipping and shopping for me!
I’ll gladly take any other tips you or others can provide to help make this easier!
5.
MoneyDummy
May 31st, 2006 at 10:37 am
I’m a LAZY, LAZY couponer! Like you, I’m not willing to match coupons with sales. WAYYY too much work.
So instead I do two things: first, I keep an Excell file of my coupons. I know this SOUNDS hard, but it’s a breeze if you mooch off of the lists from CouponMom or Pinching Your Pennies and just modify them to fit your own newspaper coupons.
Second, I go to http://www.groceryguide.com and bring up lists of store sales. I copy the list and paste that into Excell as well. I highlight the coupon list in red and the sales list in green . . . you can probably see where this is headed. Sort the lists into each other, skim the list for matches, and I’m done.
6.
Heather
May 31st, 2006 at 11:27 am
You are right, you never said how much you spend, and perhaps my estimate was over. But I’m curious, do you include ALL your food expenses in your estimate of $15/week for 2 people? That would include all meals, eaten at home or not. If you eat out for lunch, do you count that cost? The cost of the morning coffee on the way to work? A pizza ordered in on the weekends? A taco on the way home? The candy bar from the vending machine?
My $20/week includes all of the above. And yes, sometimes we do go over. Who doesn’t? We do not have triple coupons here to help us. I can only dream of the savings I would have if I did that.
There -are- ways to save more without coupons, but our diet is very much the variety of off the shelf. We don’t make a ton of food from scratch, and we don’t garden.
Ways to save without coupons:
-Grow a garden, can or freeze what’s left in the fall
-Buy “from scratch” items in large bulk cases, such as flour, oatmeal, sugar, etc.
-Stop eating processed foods all together. A candy bar is $.60-$1.50 each. Making a cake from scratch is around $2. Obviously a cake will feed more people than a candy bar. The theory works for all types of processed foods over non-processed foods.
Couponing is NOT for everyone. I’ve never said it was. I know people who have the time and comittment to be able to cook every meal from scratch, and they can save quite a bit. For our family, with having 3 school age kids & lots of school aged activities and running around, cooking from scratch isn’t my thing.
But, just because I don’t do it, or have only tried it itermitently, doesn’t mean I am going to sit here and say it doesn’t work, and it’s a crock of horse poop.
Going into couponing with the mind set and attitude that it’s a crock of HP and not giving it a real try hasn’t really done anything for your expirement, either.
Now, for instance, in your “experiment”, you say you saved just over $5, right? And then later on, you say you only spend $15 a week on food. Well, that’s saving just over 30% on your bill. Cutting your bill from $15/week to $10/week will save you a lot in comparison to your bill already.
If you were spending $100/week, and only saving $5, it’s pennies, you are right. But you claim to spend $15 a week, so lowering it 33.3% is a lot. Savings vs time is part of it, I know. Going through the coupons the first few times takes more work. After you are used to it, you can cut the coupons from 3 papers in less time than it took you to do 1 paper. Why? Because we recognize the products immediatly, and clip what we know we’ll use. Or, in my case, my 10 year old helps with some. My 7 year old sorts the coupons into types (food, snacks, HBA, etc). If you can save 50% on your bill by spending an extra 40 minutes a week, then your 40 minutes are worth that 50%. If you go in and shop, and spend $15, as opposed to $30, then you got paid $15/hour to do that.
I’d really be interested in reading your comments to the above. I love a lively debate, of which it seems you have had going here the last few days. I’m sure you’ll have ready answers for much of what I’ve said, but you also can’t discount what any of us have said as being a “myth”.
The reason so many people responded to your first post was because you didn’t acknowledge that it’s worth anyone’s time to do it. You called it science fiction, and made it out to be a myth, and that it’s nothing more than a waste of paper.
Coupons are a marketing ploy. So are commercials, product packaging, product placement in shows & movies, sales ad’s, and more. Any time you see a picture or printed name of a product, it’s a marketing ploy. It just so happens that coupons are worth money. Heck, you can even look to places like ebay for selling coupons, or buying pre-cut, pre-sorted coupons.
7.
Pamela
May 31st, 2006 at 12:00 pm
Hey Nick! I hope your grand couponing experiment will eventually show you that coupons ARE worthwhile for some people. They can work just as easily for a family of 2 as they can for a family of 5+. Here’s a link to my website. I have plenty of information there to help you find coupons on-line that you may be able to use. http://spaces.msn.com/sccouponshopper/
I am a moderator for the Yahoo Group and would welcome you to stop by for any hints or questions to make your experiment a little easier http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/SCBargainHunters/ . Now I do understand that being in SC is NOT the same as being in Washington, but there is still some information there that might help you out. PLUS, if you place a wish list in the files section, I’ll be happy to send you a few coupons for things you actually use and you don’t even have to clip them yourself. (Don’t feel too special, I do the same for everyone else~lol).
As far as spending large amounts of time to use coupons, it takes a few weeks to get into a set “pattern” that works for you. I use a cheap paper cutter to cut my coupons. It takes me about 20 mintues to clip all the coupons and organize them into my binder. I use the internet and excel to set up my sales lists. (I emailed you a couple) The list makes it much easier to find the great sales and match up the coupons.
Thanks for addressing all the comments. We were wondering if you would.
Pamela
8.
Laurie
May 31st, 2006 at 12:45 pm
I’ve been following this thread with interest. As an avid couponer, I save on practically everything I buy. But I’d love to see your shopping list for a month if you can feed 2 people on $15 a week. That boggles my mind. Could you share with us what the months shopping list was that you only paid $60 for a month?
9.
MoneyDummy
May 31st, 2006 at 2:00 pm
I’m with Laurie! I’d LOVE to see that shopping list!
10.
Nick
May 31st, 2006 at 2:59 pm
Heather, the $15 doesn’t cover meals eaten out (which is about once a week) but I thrown that into a separate entertainment/dining out category. We’re not coffee drinkers, nor do we often go for take-out. I haven’t used a vending machine as far back as I can remember, and if I can’t go the six minutes of my drive home without stopping for a taco, I’m in serious trouble!
Regarding the tips you provided for eating without coupons–we follow every single one of them!
I agree that shaving 33% off a family’s grocery bill would be quite an accomplishment, but at $15/week, our 33% off is a pittance compared to 33% off a $100 weekly grocery bill. Because of the high value I put on my free time (especially since I don’t have all that much of it), spending 40 minutes a week to save even 100% off my grocery bill would still only translate to about $22/hour. Assuming I could pull off such a feat, many people would see that as an enormous savings, but I really wouldn’t be one of them. It’s just my personal feelings regarding the return on my time invested.
Hopefully by now I’ve made it more clear that I think coupons are a wonderful thing for some people to use. And maybe with the advice and tips I’ve been reading, they’ll become a wonderful thing for me to use, too.
Laurie and MoneyDummy, I could write a whole ‘nother article on how I put together my shopping list… and maybe I will sometime down the road. In short, my wife makes a list that includes specific items we need, but she also adds in general categories like “fruit,” “vegetables,” “meat,” or “dinner side dishes.” Once we’re in the store, we match those categories to specific items. By keeping our list highly generalized, we open ourselves up to more options–including unadvertised store specials–instead of specific items. At the same time, we don’t waste money on unneeded items that don’t fall into our categories. It’s more complicated than that, but suffice it to say we don’t use a traditional shopping list.
What you may be more interested in are our grocery receipts. I don’t really want to reveal every little thing we eat to the entire world, but maybe I can provide a general survey of the items we end up purchasing as a part of the Experiment sometime. For the most part, our shelves and fridge are full of fresh items (mostly produce and some meats), items that aren’t worth the effort to make from scratch (pasta, cereal, condiments, etc.), and various other staples (oils, spices, milk, bread, and so on).
Finally, one reader pointed out that a very old post of mine says we spent $300/month on groceries. That was a very rough estimation, by which I mean very wrong. That total was from before the days I started using Quicken, so the real amount was probably closer to $150-200/month. We’ve since drastically changed our eating habits, and that’s why the total has dropped to a little over $60/month. The main culprit of the previously higher food bills? Meat! Once we went from eating meat daily to 2-4 times a week, we sliced quite a bit of fat off our grocery spendings. Processed foods that we now try to avoid also accounted for some of that extra cost. So for us, the biggest savings came from changing our food habits–likely for the better!
There is one bad consequence of this lengthy yet enjoyable discussion of food and coupons–you’ve all made me hungrier than usual the last couple of days! In fact, I’m hungry right now. For tacos.
Really wish I had a coupon…
11.
Tammy
May 31st, 2006 at 7:40 pm
I remember when I was single and didn’t have alot of money for food so mostly what I lived on was bologna sandwiches and soft drinks sometimes I would splurge and buy Dinty Moore Beef Stew in a can. That was about $15.00 a week.
Anybody get my point???
12.
Nick
May 31st, 2006 at 9:14 pm
I’m not sure that we do, Tammy. You might be suggesting that we have a similar diet, but I assure you we eat plenty of very healthy food as detailed in my previous comment. Or maybe you wanted to point out that bologna, soft drinks, and brand name pre-made cans of stew cost a lot of money. But please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.
13.
Jo
May 31st, 2006 at 10:00 pm
Very good point, jo. Coupons can do more than help you and your own family. I am curious, however, as to how long it took to clip all those coupons. Maybe I just don’t have the technique down yet, but it would take me a good long time to accumulate such a big pile. Still, that’s quite an accomplishment! (And now I’m hungry for baked beans. Wish I had a coupon…)
The above comment you made was directed to me so I have copied and pasted it so others will know what I am talking about.
As for the time it takes me to clip coupon, not long at all really.
There is a trick to this also. lol
you gather all your inserts, seperate them in to piles of the same ones and cut the whole stack out at one time. By using this method, I can clip all the coupons out of the inserts on sundays( I usually have 20 -30 inserts each week that I get for free!) then I cut them all out at one time while watching tv. really quick.
As for all the inserts ( thought I better address this before you go off on a tangent over the cost of them or assume that I steal them outa the papers) I have friends who are single and do not buy alot of groceries, clients who I buy for gives me the inserts that they have or someone gave them to them. different groups ( church , scouts) saves me their inserts and the different food banks that I donate to weekly saves me the ones that they are not using. so I get tons of inserts for free each week.
now, try my method and see just how fast you can cut the coupons out.
14.
MoneyDummy
May 31st, 2006 at 11:51 pm
I’m sure you can understand our curiousity. After all, most of us are/hang out with/spend time with some extremely hard core frugalites and we’ve never heard the 60.00 claim before.
If you’ve found a way to do this and still eat healthily, WE WANT TO KNOW EVERYTHING! What your lists look like, what your receipts look like, what you include in your food budget, what you do with your leftovers, what your menus look like. . . . I know it’s nosy, but if you can really do this then I see an opportunity for great learning and savings here. I hope you’ll divulge and explain EVERYTHING.
15.
Nick
June 1st, 2006 at 9:56 am
You’re right, MoneyDummy. I shouldn’t hold out on you guys! (Or maybe I should and force you all to buy my “secrets” in book form for $29.95!!!)
But I don’t want to dump all of our frugal eating habits on the world in one sitting, so I’ll add a Frugal Eating series to the queue of goodies I have coming up. You and everyone else can look forward to it sometime soon!
16.
Brenda A.
June 1st, 2006 at 2:01 pm
I appreciate the way you’ve handled all the couponers’ comments and suggestions, especially your ‘Why Coupons Work Great For Some People’ section. Glad to hear that your spare time is of greater value to you-that’s definitely a factor to consider. Some of us couponers though are in a family situation that doesn’t allow for us to add much to our family income, but we do have time at home to better use what funds we have. May I also remind everyone that a dollar earned is LESS than a dollar saved. If you earn $100, then how much will go to Social Sec., state and /or federal income tax, etc. When I saved $107 this week at the grocery on my hurricane food & batteries, I saved the entire $107-no income tax on that!
Thank you again…enjoyed your blog!
17.
Tammy
June 1st, 2006 at 4:23 pm
Just to save a debate:
I think the point we are all trying to make is that if you feel so strongly about your method then why don’t you give us a few pointers?
You see Faye has surely given alot of time and effort to see that we try to get the best deals instead of keeping it all to herself. If we find a different way of doing things that works for us then she just encourages that instead of telling us that it is not going to work or that it wrong and that we are wasting time and money.
And just to clear up my last comment I really don’t see how you can have any variety of anything for $15.00 a week. I mean what do you use for laundry, toiletries and health food is not cheap.
We eat well, too (now) but I am spending around 35.00 to 45.00 a week on groceries and like yesterday I bought tomatoes…$5.40 for 5 at the grocery store but I had a coupon for 2.00 off any 5.00 produce purchase so just the tomatoes hit my target.
Our point is… just share your strategy!!
18.
Rachael Woodard
June 1st, 2006 at 7:51 pm
Obviously I have a vested interest in people using coupons, since we provide coupons to people around the nation to help them achieve their financial goals. (www.Thecouponclippers.com) However, I found the most interesting point of this whole discussion was that you placed a dollar value on your free time. I think that sometimes we forget that.
Coming from someone who works 90-100 hours per week (Yes, I figured it out), I can sympathize with you and I truly am reducing my income by the dollar value that I’ve placed on my time when I choose NOT to work. However, though I am TOTALLY convinced that we should use coupons, I tend to utilize them MORE so that I’ll have more disposable money to allow me to have more fun on the few hours per week when I am not working.
However, most people are NOT reducing their income by their income per hour when they cut coupons. In other words, they work 40-45 hours per week, and are only paid for those 40-45 hours per week. Clipping coupons will not take away from their pre-set salary. So, it is truly “tax free” money that they never did have to earn in the first place and a real boon to someone’s income in a totally tax-sheltered way.
It is a way to increase their income without increasing their tax bracket and a way to “grow” their lifestyle without paying more in income taxes.
My mother, who is worth a lot, looked at me one day and said, “We don’t clip coupons because we have to, we do it so that we can have more to share with others.” If you kill the goose that lays the golden egg, you won’t have any more golden eggs. So, by growing her own resources, she was enabling her own “charitable” outreaches to grow. It’s certain that our local Walmart is able to donate more to charity than our local Kmart!
–Rachael
19.
inagm
June 3rd, 2006 at 10:08 pm
I’m too lazy to clip coupons. If I want to save more money on food I just eat/buy less food.
I suppose you couldn’t tell 9 growing kids to eat less food tho.
20.
Jo
July 4th, 2006 at 5:09 pm
What? No update. I thought I read somewhere that you posted you were going to update in June and its July? Have you given up on coupons?
21.
Nick
July 4th, 2006 at 5:17 pm
June update.
22.
Obbop
August 22nd, 2007 at 8:23 am
When the price is right, BUY!!!! Buy like a dervish. Spend, spend as if spending is the only way to save the Milky Way from intergalactic invaders.
Back in the college days when money was tight a local independent grocery store has those ramen noodle packets on sale for 4-cents each (back in the early 1980s but that was still a super cheap price). Hustled down and met the store opener. Cleared the shelf and asked for more. We went to the stock room and there was 30 cases of 24-per-case sitting there, serene, calm, unmoving as good ramen should.
“I’ll take them all,” I proclaimed and that I did.
Those 35 cases of ramen noodles lasted quite a spell, allowing frugal eating. When extra money entered the itty bitty travel trailer I rented as a home, those el cheapo turkey hot dogs were bought and one or two sliced and added to the ramen.
I even learned to love my ramen straight from the plastic wrapper. Take one to school and I had a 4-cent lunch.
For fun, eat one or two dry packs and then drink a bunch of water and watch the belly swell!!!! Provided that lusted-after full feeling desired by all “starving college students.”
Yep, it was possible to eat for 12-cents per day. Doing so likely made the neo-cons happy!!!! Proof that the masses of underclass Americans do not need an increase in the minimum wage or that the relentless ever-growing percentage of the national wealth flowing into the hands of a very small minority of elite-class Americans is undesirable.
Let them eat ramen!!!!!!!!!!
23.
Frugal Dad
January 7th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
I joined The Grocery Game and played for a few weeks, diligently clipping coupons out of our Sunday paper. However, I found the whole process of inventorying coupons to be too time-consuming and wasteful. I eventually canceled the Grocery Game and tried things on my own. I save a few dollars a week without much additional effort, but am not able to save the 30-40% promised by some coupon masters.
24.
Brian
June 5th, 2008 at 11:34 am
Blog crosspost
http://www.punny.org/money/punny-moneys-grand-coupon-experiment-part-3/
“What else are you doing while your cutting out coupons? When my wife clips coupons, she’s chatting with me or watching TV or doing something else she’d be doing anyhow. There’s no real time lost. It’s one of those things — like knitting — that she’s able to do while multitasking.”
The article sums up my beliefs on coupons pretty well (this page isn’t the first part of his experiment you’ll have to browse a bit to find it) but the real gems on that site are the responses from coupon fanatics like the one above. I get the impression that all “couponers” are morbidly obese television zombies. They completely ignore him when he says that his family eats mostly produce and thus coupons are worthless to him because he doesn’t consume 12 boxes of oreo cookies and tons of sunny delight every week and really it only makes them look worse. How proud can you be when your idea of saving money is shaving a few cents off on a case-lot of SPAM rather than eating like a human being?
25.
Ry
July 18th, 2008 at 10:26 am
to continue along the lines of moneydummy’s comment (14), I’m a bit more interested in WHAT everyone’s buying than I am in how much you’re saving. saving money is great and all, but at what “cost”? Having for many years shopped at health food stores, small ones, avoiding whole foods or other chains that have the infrastructure to produce circulars with coupons, and buy in bulk from producers - forcing the producer to sell at lower prices for quantity, which forces the producer to seek out cheaper ingredients… you see where I’m going with this - what I have come to realize is that the true COST of food is not in your final tally at the end of the month. It’s in your overall health (any coupon clippers on cholesterol, blood-pressure, or other diet-related medications? and are you factoring this into your expenses?) and the health of the economy and the world.
I’m not saying that you can’t be frugal and healthy, I’m just wanting to open this discussion up to a bit broader level. The ability for a company to offer a coupon usually means that they either overproduced or the store overbought. this mass production that encourages everyone along the chain to try to trim pennies and increase margins goes all the way back to the raw ingredients producers - natural or scientifically created. if everyone is searching for deals and clipping coupons, what we’ll all end up getting is the cheapest stuff money can buy. which is why china has air you would never want to breathe but also has $4 trillion to invest in the US while we run huge deficits.
also wondering how many stores people are going to in order to get these deals. Are you going to stores you’d go to without the coupons? or making a special stop? going back a few days later to the same store to get that bogo deal that expires tomorrow? are the stores all right next to each other, or in different places around town (or in other towns). How many gallons of gas do you think are spent getting there? an extra gallon a week? 2? thats nearly $10.
try simple ingredients, fresh produce, brown rice. get it close by (maybe your own backyard - or rooftop) you’ll be amazed at how cheap it can be to avoid coupons, and while you’re at it you’ll probably save yourself a few doctor’s visits, our nation’s economy, and the planet.
I know this is a thread and a site about money and not about food, but I think a macroeconomic view is relevant here and all factors should be taken into consideration. sorry for the rant (but not sorry enough to not post it…)
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[...] Update (May 31, 2006): Welcome, visitors! Be sure to read my latest Grand Coupon Experiment status which includes responses to some of your comments. [...]
Pingback by The Science (Fiction) of Coupons | Punny Money — May 31, 2006 @ 12:26 am
[...] Last week’s Punny Poll examined your coupon usage. While 15% of those who responded said they currently don’t use or never have used coupons, 59% tagged themselves as regular or prolific couponers. As for those following my grand coupon experiment, I’ll be posting another update on that later this week, so be sure to watch for that. [...]
Pingback by Punny Poll #5: How Much Is A Lot of Money to You? | Punny Money — June 19, 2006 @ 10:54 pm
[...] The reasons I gave earlier for why I suspected coupons would not work for us are still valid. Clipping coupons took too much time and just isn’t suited to our two-person, generic-loving, produce-munching shopping lifestyle. [...]
Pingback by Punny Money’s Grand Coupon Experiment, Finale | Punny Money — January 25, 2007 @ 8:15 pm