First of all, Jennifer is the couponing queen. She and her husband John even have their own couponing website, love2coupon.com. Some of her other favorites are moneysavingmom.com and hip2save.com. Add to this your grocery stores' websites, and your favorite manufacturers' websites, and you can find plenty of good coupons to use.
Jennifer enjoys going from store to store to find places where the merchandise is already on special, yet a coupon allows even more of a discount. She has received some amazing discounts by doing this. For instance, right after Thanksgiving, she went to Vons (double coupons) and saved 72 percent on some grocery items! She tells me she does even better with coupons for toiletry type things - toothpaste, room fresheners, diapers for her bambino that's coming next July, etc.
While Jennifer and John are so into websites that John makes them for a living and Jennifer gets almost all of her coupons from them, I myself and other friends still like the newspaper coupons best. About 10 years ago, before I met Jennifer, I had crowned my friend DeAnna the couponing champion. DeAnna used to take two copies of the Los Angeles Times every Sunday and spend time going through them. Two copies because she had four children at home back then. If you have a smaller family, one is probably sufficient. Sunday papers are smaller than they used to be, but still have lots of coupons.
Every Tuesday, DeAnna would take the grocery store sales papers and look for things that matched her coupons. So did a number of other women I knew. One of them, I recall, obtained a bottle of spray cleaner for 19 cents this way! It's still possible!
Not all my friends coupon that fanatically, but a few others have great tips. For instance, my friend Mindie and her husband carefully budget the money they make on Colin's income as a high school teacher and coach. And they stick to that budget. Way to go guys, how many of us have budgets but don't stick to them? Or don't even have budgets? I've found myself in both of those latter categories.
Because Mindie knows EXACTLY how much she can spend on food, she plans her menus out a month in advance, I'm pretty sure by taking the calculator to a grocery store to figure it out, even though she's going to have to go back to the grocery store for some of the items like milk and fresh produce later in the month. At the beginning of November, she knew what she was having on Nov. 29. Now, I am assuming if her family of two adults and one small child had leftovers or decided to join friends for dinner after she planned out the menu, the plan had that flexibility. But with that kind of organization, she certainly won't go over her grocery budget for the month!
My friend Sarah offered me the last tip I will share with you today. She loves to shop for food in ethnic grocery stores. Being Chinese-American, she can get a variety of grains, vegetables and seasonings for Chinese food like what she grew up with, things not found in a typical American grocery store. But, even what she can get in an American store, she often finds cheaper at the ethnic store! I haven't tried this one lately because ethnic stores are a bit of a drive out of the way for me. But Cardenas, a Latino-themed grocery store, is coming soon to a corner not too far from here. I will then!
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