Coupon Clipping Momma

I like a lot of women and men have started watching TLC's "Extreme Couponing". It is pretty amazing to see these men & women spending hundreds and thousands of dollars at the grocery store, to only pay minimum amounts of money...all because they clipped coupons and used what grocery stores offer the public.

I have started on this journey and in June will be meeting up with friends to share our coupon insight in how we can save money on our grocery bills and other items that we buy either in department stores or online.

Our gulf coast only offers a limited amount of stores to shop at for groceries (WalMart, Target, Winn Dixie) but we also can purchase grocery items at bigger chains like CVS, Walgreens & Rite Aid.

I went shopping yesterday for some dinner items for a few days, without my coupons in hand, but I did manage to save $32.69, by purchasing items that Winn Dixie offered special pricing or what they call "Reward Card" savings. I believe I did pretty good for the meals that I purchased for our family.

I do not expect to be like the people on "Extreme Couponing" for a few reasons...

1. I don't have a lot of room to stock pile unnecessary items
2. I don't have the $$ to purchase thousands of coupon inserts and keep them on hand, let alone the space for it
3. I don't have the time to spend hours in the grocery store...especially with the twins in tow.

For the months of June and July, I will either have no children or one of the two here at the house, so our normal grocery bill of $300-$400 a month, will go down considerably. That is an estimate of what it runs, depending on if the twins are on vacation or not. They get breakfast & lunch at school for FREE. It is when they are home in the evenings & weekends that they tend to eat us out of house & home. Usually on snacks like granola bars, fruit snacks, fruit, etc. They do not eat a lot of sweets, I don't usually keep them in the house and even if we do, it is not very often. For example: Halloween candy...I make two bags or containers to hold it. 1 for chocolate items and 1 for hard candy or the like. In 2009 Halloween candy lasted until 2010 Halloween...which I ended up throwing away. The same thing with 2010 Halloween candy...the chocolate is gone, but the hard candy and the like are still in our candy jar and probably will get thrown away come Halloween this year.

I have started clipping coupons from both the Sunday paper and from several online sources. I have a small binder and just need to organize it according to my grocery needs. I look forward to our Coffee & Coupon club get together in July. As well as sharing prior to and during how my coupon experience it working.

Take care,

God Bless,

Julie