The Crazy Coupon Lady

I am sure you have had this scenario happen to you. You run into the grocery store for a few items and get to the checkout line with your small amount of groceries. Ahead of you is that crazy coupon lady, you know the one! She has a huge stack of groceries and is obviously stockpiling cereal and crackers for Armageddon. She is pulling out her weekly grocery flier to debate a price of hair conditioner that wasn't ringing up properly, digging through her purse looking for that final coupon to add to her stack of 20 she is all ready using and having the checker take a look through all the bagged groceries to make sure she bought the correct cereals to match the coupon. All the time you are going crazy thinking "it is only 50 cents, just forget about it!!!!"

WELL........... I have become that crazy coupon lady. Add that to my growing list of PTA commitments, playdates and household chore chart and I don't think I can become any more suburban soccer mom! Still trying to decide if that is a good thing or bad thing:-) I have created a binder for my coupon organization. It is divided by categories (cereals, snacks, beauty, cleaning.....) with baseball card protector pages to keep all the coupons. Then I go through the sales ads and compare them with my coupons to do my meal planning for the week. I have to admit it is a bit addicting shopping for the best deal. Here is how I spent my Saturday night coupon organizing.

And here is my loot from this week's grocery trip. Some of my better deals were 3 snicker's bars for FREE (not a good deal for my diet, but how can you argue with free candy???), FREE gallon of milk, $9 bottle of hair conditioner for 99 cents! I also got 10 boxes of Kellogg's products (cereals, snacks and waffles) that will average less than 75 cents each after sales, coupons and a $10 rebate I am sending in. Not bad!!!! In total today I had $19 in manufacter coupons, $14.50 in reward dollars for the store, 50 cent reusable bag credit and a $10 rebate for a total of $44 in savings and that doesn't include the savings for sale items that I grabbed for meals for the week.

Now as crazy as my hubby may think I am, I am nowhere near as crazy as some of the people I find on line. Like check out this lady who is trying to have a grocery budget of $800 for the YEAR. Can you imagine? Most hard-core coupon queens will spend many hours store hopping to get deals at different stores. I have always valued my time as precious so am not to sure how much time I am willing to invest into going to multiple stores. Once Madison starts school and preschool begins for Nora I may try and do a little more store hopping while the girls are at their respective schools but I still plan to do the majority of my shopping at my friendly neighborhood Fred Meyer. I figure as much as you can save by hopping from store to store, you also have that much more temptation to buy more than you need to negate any savings you may gain.

If you want to jump on the coupon band-wagon with me just let me know and I will happily post some photos of my organization system and some of the more helpful websites and coupon sources I use. Happy shopping!!!