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…)

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?

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!!!!!!!!!!

I suppose you couldn’t tell 9 growing kids to eat less food tho.

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

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!!

Thank you again…enjoyed your blog!

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!

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.

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.