Have you been thinking about getting into extreme couponing? It certainly sounds as though it would be an incredibly easy way to save your family a ton of money. There are some people who do manage to save huge amounts of money on their grocery store bills that way. Before you jump into this lifestyle, there are some things you should be aware of.
Recently, I found the time to watch an episode of the television show called “Extreme Couponing”. The show certainly highlighted why some people find this intense form of shopping to be really exciting. Some of the people featured in the episode I watched actually said that they felt a “high” when they were able to save a lot of money by using coupons.
Before you decide that extreme couponing is for you, there are some things you should be aware of. It isn’t something that everyone is going to be successful at, or that everyone is going to find enjoyable.
Are you good at math? If not, then you are not going to be able to save as much money by extreme couponing as the people on the television program do. You have to be able to know what the usual price is of a certain product at each grocery store you shop at, so you can compare the two. Then, you have to be able to do the math to find out which one is better for you to use your coupons at. If you didn’t do so well in your high school math classes, then you will struggle with extreme couponing.
You also need to be shopping from a grocery store that doubles coupons. Not all of them do. If you cannot locate a grocery store near you that will double coupons, then you will never be able to save as much money as the people on the TV show do.
You have to have a ton of coupons. Where are you going to get them from? Most people are not willing to ask strangers for the coupon section of their newspapers, or to dumpster dive for the ones that have been thrown away or recycled. The alternative is to purchase multiple subscriptions to your local newspapers, and that is going to cost you some money. Some of the people in the show were paying for coupon clipping services, (which were not free to use).
Extreme couponing has to be your true passion in life in order to make this work well. You have to be willing to spend hours online searching for information about weekly sales at grocery stores. You will need to know where to find coupons that you can print out from various websites. It also will take time to do all the necessary math that is required in order to save extreme amounts of money.
Are you a super organized person? If not, then extreme couponing is not for you. You have to find a system to store multiple copies of the coupons that you have collected, (such as binder), in order for this to work. You need to have some way to keep track of which coupons have expired. Once you make your bulk purchases, you need a significant amount of storage space in your home to put all those groceries.
Image by Briana Carter on Flickr