When I brag to my friends about my coupon savings, the automatic response is I don't have time to do this. I understand how busy our lives are and know that I don't have a lot of extra time either. My husband and I both work full time and I am in graduate school. My daughters are in middle school and participate in travel soccer and run cross country and track. So, our week is always busy as well as our weekend. I have written about my hiatus from couponing but I have reevaluated that the time that I spend couponing is worth it for a couple of reasons.
1. When I am shopping the sales, our family eats at home more because we have more food. This also saves money!!!
2. When we have more food, we eat healthier!!
Today, I took the time to pay attention to the time that it took for me to organize my list and clip coupons. Since I subscribe to the grocery game, I log into the site on Monday's or any day after Monday to pull my grocery list(s). The grocery game lists all of the items that are on sale and where you can find the coupon. The list also is color coded. Blue= stock up!!! it is a great price, green=free, and black= that it is a good price but will be cheaper. Your shopping list could be huge, but I go through and just select the items that our family will eat. No reason to buy an item just because it is on sale if no one will eat it.
The list is then narrowed down with just the items that you will buy buying. Another wonderful thing about the grocery game list is that it also sorts the items by where they are located in the store. This saves time!!! When you rely on the list, you are in and out of the store within 30 minutes because you aren't browsing the aisles. This also saves you money because you aren't adding extra items to your cart!
Once the list is printed and sorted (this takes less than 5 minutes), I match up my coupons. Today, this took me only 20 minutes to do. I purchased 34 items at Meijer and was able to find the coupons that matched up to the items in this amount of time.
Today's shop saved me 50 dollars. So, for 25 minutes of my time I was able to save 50 dollars! I think that this is a wonderful way to invest your time.
Clip your coupons while the family watches tv or while you are supervising homework! If you do this every week and save 50 dollars on average, you will be saving your family 200 dollars a month for 2 hours worth of time for the month!!! Not too bad!!
How many of us have easily "wasted" 2 hours by browsing the internet or watching tv. I challenge you to give it a try!!!
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