Everyone wants to save money on their grocery bills, especially now that food prices are steadily rising. But not all of us can match the “extreme couponers” that somehow manage to purchase $100 worth of food for less than $10. In addition, if you’re anything like me, you don’t have time to look through dozens of flyers containing coupons and half a dozen sales papers from all the local grocery stores, match coupons to sales for the best deals and then visit three or four stores to complete your weekly shopping.
Don’t worry. You don’t have to do those things in order to save money with coupons. No, I can’t tell you a simple way to buy $100 worth of groceries for less than $10, but I can help you get significant savings on your favorite products without too much work on your part. Here’s how to do it.
Choose Your Coupon Flyers Carefully
Determine which flyers are more likely to have coupons you’ll use and only look through those flyers. Recycle the rest, or pass them on to a friend that enjoys couponing. If you frequently find coupons you like in the Sunday newspaper, ask a friend or neighbor that doesn’t clip coupons if you can have the coupon pages from their newspapers.
Trade Coupons with Friends
If you have friends that clip coupons, give them a short list of items for which you’d like coupons and ask them for a list of coupons they’d like. When you’re going through coupons, you can look for coupons for them as well as for yourself, and they can do the same.
Look for Coupons in the Store
When you’re grocery shopping, look for coupons stuck to packages and if you buy something with an attached coupon, make sure you remove it and use it to save money at the register. Don’t pull coupons off items you don’t plan to buy, though; that’s just unfair to other shoppers. Also look for coupons in small racks attached to the shelves near certain items; for instance, you might find coupons for a popular brand of salsa in front of the tortilla chips. It is acceptable to take a couple of these even if you don’t plan to buy the item right away.
Look Online
Looking through coupons online can save you some time and also some money since many coupon websites are free while the Sunday newspaper is not. Most coupon sites allow you to search for particular items or search for particular categories of items, such as health products or dairy products. After selecting the coupons you want, just print them. It’s quicker and easier than searching through paper flyers and cutting out all those coupons with scissors.
Email Companies and Ask for Coupons
This is my favorite tip. If you simply email companies and ask for coupons, almost all will mail some to you. It only takes a few minutes to locate the website of various companies online and send a brief email (look for a “Contact Us” link on the company’s homepage) requesting some coupons. What I love about doing this is that I get coupons for exactly the products I really like and use often and don’t have to weed out the ones I don’t want.