My Experience Reviewed

As promised, I am going to try to describe my experience the first time I tried using Internet downloaded coupons at the store. 
 

I chose to use the coupons at the Stop & Shop, since they are one of the stores that participates in the YourBucks Savings offers from Coupon Network.  By the way, the coupons say Super Stop & Shop, but I don’t think the store I went to in Monroe is a “Super” store – the coupons worked anyway. 

There is a nice summary on the bottom of the receipt that breaks down the savings you get and where the savings were from.  My total was $162.00 before savings and after deducting my $27.17 savings, my total was $136.35.  Not too bad, but I could have done much better with more planning.  

The savings were $15.77 (for 13 items) from using my Stop & Shop savings card and purchasing things that were advertised in the store that were on special that day.  This is something I look out for all the time in the store, so I guess I am not a true beginner.  In fact, according to the receipt, I have a year-to-date savings of $56.98.   $29.18 of that savings was from the shopping I did between January and now and the total doubled with that day’s savings, so I did see an improvement without much effort! 

$3.00 was from what they called “Personal Thanks Savings 2.”  I looked this program up on their website and was not able to determine where that particular savings came from.  The summary goes on to say that $.40 of my savings was from doubling coupons (which I did not know that Stop & Shop did) bringing the savings on my S&S card to $19.17.  The rest of the savings of $8.00 was from manufacturer’s coupons, which the receipt informs me that I used 5 total. 

When I went to their website, I found that I should register my card online by creating a Stop & Shop account.  I have had the S&S card for at least 8 years, but I have never registered it online.  I also clicked on “Stop & Shop Card Account” and “updated” my account which automatically entered me in a sweepstakes to win FREE groceries for a year. 

At the bottom of the receipt are listed the store “rewards.”  The first one is called the 5% program for which I earned 135 points from this shopping trip.  I got a coupon at the register for 5% savings off a future order, which may be from this 5% program, but that coupon also expires in two weeks.  The fine print on the coupon says that the 5% is calculated “after discounts and coupons.”   The other rewards programs listed were for Frozen Food Month and a Sandwich Program.  They added a note that the Deli Sandwich program is ending on 3/24/12 – “please redeem your coupon for free Deli Sandwich on or before” that date.  Online, I looked up for more information about these reward plans.  The Frozen Food month promotion is that you receive a 10% checkout coupon when you spend $75 on frozen foods from 2/24 through 3/22.  I couldn’t find any information about the Sandwich Program on the website.  

What is not listed on the receipt are the YourBucks offers that printed out after I was done paying.  They were printed with the purchase targeted offers that come out normally after a shopping trip.   The YourBucks savings are for savings on your next trip.  They expire fairly soon – within 2 weeks of purchase – and they are only for a deduction from your total so you would need to purchase at least that much on your next trip.  I received $2.00 from Kraft, $1.00 from General Mills and $.50 from Dole.  I just have to remember to have them with me and I have to go back to S&S within the two week period.  

The S&S website includes savings like printable coupons and a copy of the weekly circular, information about promotions (including one to support your local school and one to get discounts on Shell gasoline), meal planning and healthy living tips, and a BETA test of a shopping list program.  Each time you use this shopping list, you are entered into a contest to win one month ($600) in free groceries. 

As predicted, I am starting to get email in the account I opened for coupon gathering, but it is not all junk mail.  As Kathy says about flyers and circulars, the ones you get sent to you have additional discounts over and above what you can get in a newspaper or from the store itself.  I was happy about the meager savings I got, but I am not so sure I will be able to find the time to do the additional planning that would be required to do better.  There are a lot of offers available – I suspect that you should select one or two methods (sites) that work easily for you as you get started and then add additional steps as you have the mind to do this! 

Good luck to you all.  Keep visiting this blog for more discoveries and please, feel free to add your ideas.  I have invited you all to be contributing authors on the page so you can post your own information if you wish. 

Observations from the Start

I will admit that I am a complete newbie to the world of living thrifty using coupons, etc.  I am about as qualified to host a Savings Club as I was to host the De-Clutter Club!  That is why I am happy to see that we have Kathy and Jolly and other members of the club that are truly practicing what they preach. 

I thought, since I am starting from the beginning, that I would share some of my observations.  On the Friday after our meeting, I tried to look at some of the websites we discussed to print out some coupons for products I will definitely use.  I found out fairly quickly that you have to register in each site, so I created a Yahoo email specifically for the purpose of gathering coupons.  Just tracking where I have registered will be the first hurdle.  I suggest always using the same user name, email and password throughout, so that you will always know how to get into any site.  And use a separate account since I can imagine that you will be getting a lot of mail!  

The first site I went to visit was www.taylortownpreview.com, which is useful to see what coupons were issued on what date and in what paper or circular, but it is really just a clearinghouse for other coupon sites, such as www.coupons.com and www.couponloop.com.  Most of the information on Taylor Town is expired or way out-of-date.  On coupons.com, you have to download a coupon printer in order to print the coupons they have to offer.  Once I downloaded the “printer,” I got a message that the coupon I was going for had expired.  This was very frustrating.  

I visited a few other sites and found that some are just blogs of information from other couponers that need to be read through or searched to get useful information, some are more about freebies, some are about larger ticket purchases and some are very complicated to get into.  I was getting a little discouraged that this was going to be harder than I thought. 

www.livingrichwithcoupons.com has a tab for beginners with useful information and, as I said in a previous blog, www.hotcouponworld.com has Couponing 101, 102 and 103 and other practical tips of the kind that Kathy shared with us in her packet of information.  This, however, takes a lot of time to read through and digest.  I thought it would be a simple task to just find a coupon and cash in on the savings. 

I surfed a little from some of the sites and found a site called www.couponnetwork.com which features the Coupon Network Advisory Board and offers a blog site called Smart Living, about what is new and trendy in the world of coupons and organizing your life.  Many of the links to information on the blog were dead links but there are taps to printable manufactures coupons and a program called YourBucks Offers that prints deals that are specific to certain stores such as Stop & Shop, Target, Kmart and Walgreens – all stores that are convenient to my home.  This site is nice in that you get a summary page of product offers (18) from which you can get more information or you can select and the coupon is added to “Your Wallet.”  These products can be sorted by category, featured brands or store.  Once you add everything you want from Coupon Network and from YourBucks Offers to your wallet, you can print all the offers consolidated 3 to a page.  I imagine this will save some printer ink.  I used this site to print about a dozen manufacture’s coupons and YourBucks offers and it was very easy. 

Tomorrow, I will tell you how things went when I went to Stop & Shop, armed with my coupons and YourBucks offers.  I will share some more observations and try to make some preliminary conclusions about my first attempt as saving money.

Sharing Forward

At the first meeting of our new club format, we had a mixed group of savers. Some were well into their quest to save money on their household budgets and some, like me, were there to learn how to get started. Using Kathy's packet of information as a jumping off point, we shared the things we have learned, asked questions and got great answers...I think even the hard core savers picked up some new resources and learned about others that were not worth wasting time on.

It is amazing how many good websites are out there that can help obtain and organize your savings. Each one has strengths over others which makes them all worthwhile to pay an occasional visit. One tip I learned about having multiple sites that you deal with is that some sites have limits on how many of a particular coupon you can print, but if it is a great deal, you may want to find the same coupon on a different site.  Some of the sites even give you a preview of what coupons are about to come out so that you can make sure they are included in the paper you buy.  Apparently the local papers are available at discount prices in the dollar stores, but they don't always include all of the circulars or the shoppers are taking multiple circulars out of the other papers on sale.  It is worth doing some research as to what coupons you can expect to find when you buy your paper.  Some of these new subscriber deals to get home delivery of a particular paper bring the price down to well below the dollar per issue you can get at the dollar store and you are pretty much assured that you will get all of the coupons.  You may have to cancel your subscription once the trial period is over and resubscribe several months later when you are again considered a "new" subscriber.

There was a good discussion about ways to get the savings without having to use paper and printer ink printing out an actual coupon. There are some stores where you can download the deal onto your shopper card and the savings will be deducted at the register. Everyone felt that this was great news and hoped that all stores will eventually go this route.

Some of the sites that were shared are: thecouponclipper.com; taylortownpreview.com, livingrichwithcoupons.com, moneysavingmom.com, fatwallet.com (we were warned that fatwallet.com has a running commentary by the users that can get a little mean from time to time), slickdeals.net, afullcup.com, couponsuzy.com and hotcouponworld.com.
There are also other kinds of sites where you can get valuable coupons for new products as long as you agree to help spread the word about the product after you try it. One of these sites mentioned was bzzagent.com where you can sign up to participate in various product categories like food or cosmetics.

The conversation about couponing always brings up a discussion about the Extreme Couponing television show on TLC. One of our members had the inside scoop on some of the contestants that seem to buy huge quantities of items that it seems that they couldn't possibly use in a lifetime and it turns out that some of these individuals turn around and sell these items at flea markets for a sizable profit.

Thanks again to Kathy, Jolly and everyone who came and shared their expertise and enthusiasm. I think we are really off and running on this new topic. We hope to see more new people at our future meetings. The more people we have, the more we will all get to know.

Off to a Good Start

The South Brunswick De-Clutter Club has successfully morphed into the South Brunswick Savings Club. Now remember, this is about saving money, not clutter! Keep up the good work of de-cluttering, earn money from your de-cluttering and learn to be spare in your spending as well as in accumulating clutter!

Kathy Quinto-David and her husband Jolly brought an amazing packet of informtation about how to cut your expenses while still being generous to others. The packet includes instructions on how to get started on your savings journey, how to get coupons, how to organize your coupons and other cost savings tools, and how to create a shopping and storage master-plan. They have included an extensive collection of tips and techniques about how to shop for food and save money using coupons, websites, store specials and shopper savings cards. This section is full of great examples to make this process as simple and effective as possible.

Kathy has also shared with us time and money saving ideas such as "Things you can freeze that you may never have thought you could," portioning your purchases to make preparation and use more convenient; a list of websites for stores and coupon sources; and a booklist of good books on the topic, most available here at the library.

Also, she has shared some of the tools she has found that work well with planning your savings, such as a meal planner, a shopping organizer and a cost savings record. Other tip sheets include Seasonal Savings and monthly "specials." They have even given us enrollment forms to get savings cards at most of the local grocery stores, including a Store Directory for the ShopRite in North Brunswick.

Thank you very much to Kathy and Jolly for preparing this fantastic packet! We will continue to have copies of this packet for newcomers at our future meetings. Please join us at our next meeting on April 5, 2012 at 7:00 in Program Room 1B and on the first Thursday of every month. We will continue the great discussion that we started last night, sharing knowledge, resources and coupons. Bring any coupons for products you don't use and pick up some for products you do use. We will also start a collection of expired coupons that we will send off to a military base, so come prepared and leave armed with the ability to save money and have a good time doing it!

Happy Leap Day

We are certainly selecting a trendy topic to consider for the new direction for our De-Clutter Club. On the Today Show this morning, they had a segment about 11 ways to get free stuff. This is a link to the article: http://lifeinc.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/02/29/10536606-11-offers-for-free-chocolate-business-cards-more

Their list is primarily to get free things on your birthday from restaurants and shops if you register as a fan or frequent customer, so if today is your birthday, you had better get going since your birthday won’t come around again for another four years!

This is part of the concept that I talked about in my blog a few days ago, that customer loyalty is often rewarded with free things and coupons for discounts, so make a list of your favorite products and check the manufacturer’s website or Google the product name, to see if they have any offers or, if you don’t see something, then ask for something!

Our favorite De-Cluttering Expert, Jamie Novak, has developed a perfect plan for the direction that we are planning for our group. In her book Stop Throwing Money Away (Wiley, 2010), she introduces a concept for creating a support group for the process of trimming down your life – such as de-cluttering and making money. Her group is called a “Moneyize” group. I have written Jamie to see if she still has a call-in about Moneyize and if she might do some kind of new program about getting rid of clutter and at the same time making money and spending less. I will bring a copy of her book to the meeting tomorrow evening for our discussion on how we can expand our discussions. She has some steps for starting and running a Moneyize group and she has a ten-question self-assessment Clutter and Money (CAM) quiz that will help determine where we all are along the road to self-improvement in this area. I will have the quiz and the scoring instructions at the meeting.

I will also bring a copy of The Cheap Book by Robin Herbst and Julie Miller (Cincinnati, Ohio: F&W Publications, 2008) which takes a humorous look at the way you can approach “your inner cheapskate.” On pages 3 and 4, the authors describe the rating system applied against certain behaviors from Cheap Factor 1: Sensible (like buying your college textbooks used) to Cheap Factor 5: Cheap (you use a coupon on a first date and make your guest pay their half of the bill). There is also an extreme category called Cheap Factor 10 that makes Scrooge look like Santa Claus (you save your calendars so you can reuse them ten years later!)

I spoke with Kathy, who will be our group leader for discussions about living well on less, last week about our group and we are both very excited about the way the group is headed. I hope to see all our “regulars” there as well as some new faces. I will pass around a sign-up sheet for contact information so that we will be able to share information in email blasts and through this blog.

See you tomorrow evening at 7:00 p.m. – we have both halves of the Program Room (1A and 1B) so we can handle a larger group.

Another Aid in a Quest Toward Cheap Living

Today I checked the Bookmobile collection and found a few more titles in the same vein as the ones I have been featuring in the past few blogs. I grabbed a little one called 365 Ways to Live Cheap that seemed to be on point. The book is by Trent Hamm, founder of the website www.thesimpledollar.com (F&W Publications, 2009). The “ways” are presented in short paragraph format and, yes, they are numbered. But they are also divided into chapters by subjects, so there is commonality between every 20-25 topics. The chapters all start with “Cheap Tactics for:” and cover topics such as: Appliances, automobiles, clothing, electronics, groceries and supplies, insurance, utilities and bills and vacation.

There is a short little quiz at the front of the book to determine “Where Does Your Money Really Go?” but I would say that the quiz actually helps you determine, “How does your money go?”

The first chapter is “The Ten Biggest Tips for Living Cheap” and these are like the 10 easy ways to reduce clutter – they are obvious but worth reading and keeping in mind as you move toward a goal of living within your means. 1) Take little steps, not big ones, 2) Realize that you are not alone in your mission, 3) Spend less than you earn, 4) Calculate how much your really make, 5) Record every penny you spend for an entire month, 6) Master the 10 second rule that says you should consider each impulse type purchase you want to make for at least 10 seconds and ask yourself if you really need to have the item, 7) Master the 30 day rule, too, which says just about the same as rule 6 but applies to larger, more costly and potentially more impulsive purchases, and wait 30 days before you really commit to buying an item you saw in the store, 8) Keep track of your progress, 9) Talk about your money, especially with your partner and 10) Automate your savings, by which they mean to have your bank automatically deposit or transfer the amount of money you are “saving” into a savings account to be saved for an emergency.

Pretty basic stuff, but like rule number one says, take baby steps. A lot of what is suggested by both de-clutter experts and frugal living experts is unlearning old habits and forming new habits and habit changing takes time. If you try to do it all at the start – you are sure to fail. If you need another kind of pep-talk, there are a host of websites that give you ideas about how to change bad habits into good one. It is all part of the plan! Use resources wisely and liberally!

Extreme Cheapskates

Last night there was a new show called Extreme Cheapskates on TLC at 10:00 p.m. It seems to be a single episode at this point, but perhaps it will grow into something larger. It was repeated early this morning at 1:00 a.m. I missed both. The description of the program on TLC’s website is: “Extreme Cheapskates gives you an insider's look at the most outrageous penny-pinching people around. From making their own reusable cloth toilet paper to singing for their supper, you won't believe their extreme and inventive ways to save money.” I will try to see if TLC is planning to air this program again in the future – just in case you have an extreme idea to make reusable toilet paper!

On the TLC Website, they have a section called Dollars and Sense Guide (http://tlc.howstuffworks.com/tv/dollars-and-sense) that includes videos, tips and advice on the kind of issues that we will be discussing in future meetings of our Savings Club: How to Half your Gas Bill, Saving Big on Groceries, Home Renovations on a Budget, and Low Cost Thoughtful Gift Giving Tips, to name a few.

I also noticed on a visit to a CVS Pharmacy last evening, a scanner near the entrance where you could scan the items you wish to purchase and if a coupon is available, it will print out for you on the spot. That seemed to be a pretty good deal, if you remember to use it and if you have the time. I should have checked to see what this scanner was called to see of it can be found in other locations or if it is exclusive to CVS.

There seems to be no shortage of advice in books, magazines, online and on TV about how to live a frugal life. I think the next topic of discussion will have to be how to create a longer day to be able to digest all of this good information. Once you start to look into this subject, there are cost saving opportunities all around us – hopefully we will discover a few of these by sharing our knowledge and experiences with others in our group – this will save us all some time in getting to the best tips and tricks without having to read everything ourselves. Like de-cluttering, this is an easily overwhelming subject!

By the way, I visited the Monroe Public Library yesterday and all the free tickets for Jamie Novak’s program are taken. They suggested that I show up early and maybe I could get in, but that sounds too risky to take a day off of work for. Hopefully, if someone from our group wanted to see Jamie, you were able to get to Monroe for your tickets.