Couponing

Ok, so I admit that I'm a little behind the curve with the whole couponing thing.  I'm pretty sure most of my friends on here have gone through a couponing phase and are kind of over it.  Like most things, I've picked up on the craze a little later than most.  Back in Dallas, I will admit that I didn't bother with coupons because I didn't concern myself with my grocery bill.  I'm not proud of that truth, but it is what it is.  And although Wes and I have lived together since 2007 (side note: seriously? where has the time gone?) we did not combine finances until we were married.  We split the bills, but he worried about his money and I worried about mine.  Now he worries about all of our money (a benefit of marrying an accountant!)

So here we are, one year into our marriage and we've made some amazing progress.  We are blessed to both have good jobs and we make a good living, but we have a lot of student loan debt.  Like, more than a house's worth of student loan debt.  <shudders>  Since our wedding, we have paid off all of our credit card debt and are 2 months away from having 2 paid for cars.  (Don't tell Wes I want a new car).  And, since we no longer have the house in Dallas (hooray!), we are saving like mad men to buy a house in Atlanta next summer.  And I can't wait, frankly, apartment living is for the birds.  And by birds, I mean incredibly rude neighbors who never sleep and have terrible taste in music.

I decided to start couponing to see if I could cut our grocery budget in order to speed up the savings process.  And I think I did - in September, I saved $235 and spent about $350.  I do think that the savings will spread out more over time because I definitely bought more items that I usually do, and if I can manage to spread out what we have and plan our meals wisely, our bills should be lower next month.  I mean, our cabinets are seriously full.  The problem that I find with couponing, however, is while we need to eat down the food that we have, I cannot miss shopping a sale!  The one thing keeping me reigned in right now is that we don't have a pantry or an extra freezer, so I'm quite limited in storage.  Also, my fear of becoming one of "those people" on TLC helps me pump the brakes when necessary.

I do have glimpses of life as one of "those" people.  For example, I shopped on Sunday, and I was really tempted to buy some Palmolive dish soap with a final price of 25 cents.  It was a big bottle!  But I didn't buy it because we truly don't need any dish soap (one bottle in use and one back up bottle at the moment).  Two weeks ago, Truvia was on sale for $2.99 and I had a $2 coupon.  I forgot to buy it over the weekend, so I definitely made a special trip to get my 99 cent Truvia.  Man was that satisfying!  And, I think we have seven boxes of cereal right now.  I eat cereal almost every morning, but I seriously can't let myself buy any more boxes until I eat the ones we have!  We also have a pretty ridiculous cracker supply and 4 back up bags of cat food for the lazy ones.  Don't judge...

My strategy is pretty simple.  I clip coupons from the Sunday paper, and enter them into a sortable Excel spreadsheet (nerd alert!)  I also print coupons from coupons.com, target.com, and publix.com.  Then I check the sale ads from Publix & Target, cross-reference with my coupon spreadsheet, and buy accordingly.  If we need something that isn't on sale, then I'll pick a couple of coupons and see what brand is the best deal when I get to the store.  And that's it.  I don't go to multiple stores, seriously ya'll, that is too intense.

I also have a health & beauty supply closet that is ridiculous.