Think about that.
I've had lots of friends take up couponing over the years. Many of them stop after a couple months, stating that they are actually spend way more money using coupons than they were before coupons. Why might that be? I can tell you exactly why. It's because they use up their whole budget buying all the crazy deals and end up with way more "crazy deal" items then they will ever use, or they buy things that they will never use anyway just because it was a crazy deal.
Seriously. I've had that same dilemma many many times. Slickdeals is one of my favorite deal sites. When you go there you are immediately faced with their "Front Page" deals - the red hot crazy deals. There's closeouts, price mistakes, online coupon codes, hot sales, and all kinds of stuff like that. You start looking at the Front Page deals and suddenly you feel like you might "need" something. Couple summers ago I almost randomly bought a gas grill. Yes, a gas grill. It was a $450 gas grill on closeout at Lowes for $30 and it showed that one of my local stores had some in stock. Suddenly I was thinking maybe I needed a new gas grill. There is nothing wrong with the one I currently own, but heck, it's $30!!! What saved me is that I thought about it for a couple hours. By then they were sold out (yes, if you see a Front Page deal you better act quick. Sometimes it pays to scroll to the last post to see if it's still active cause these deals go fast or else the store's website crashes or something like that - Slickdealers call it the "Slickdeal effect") OK, I digress... Point is, I actually saved myself $30 by not buying something I didn't need. See my point?
Fact is, I love a good deal. I think that's why couponing appeals to me so much. I get to buy stuff, but it's not stuff that will sit around forever and take up space in my house as it's consumable perishable stuff, but I still get the rush of shopping AND it saves me money as an added benefit.
When you first start couponing and working on your stockpile one of the easiest things you can start with are household goods and health and beauty aids (HBAs). Toilet paper, paper towels, toothpaste, shampoo, detergent, etc... all this stuff either has loooong expiration dates or won't expire at all and you will always need them. HBAs are easy. They are always on sale. I can get HBAs for 0.50 or less all day long. You can find a crazy HBA deal Every. Single. Week. Not kidding.
So this has been my dilemma... should I try to find more food donations for the food pantry or do I pick up a whole bunch of sale HBAs this week? I feel like I should be buying food for the food pantry but the place where I drop off clearly lists things like shampoo and detergent as things they need.
Since I bought 10 newspapers this weekend I wanted to make use of all the coupons I got. One of the higher value coupons that came out this week were these...
$4 off 2 Herbal Essences shampoo, conditioner or styling products.
I'm holding onto $40 worth of coupons, $44 if you count the Kroger ecoupon for the same that I have loaded onto my Kroger Plus card...and, Kroger has them on sale for $2.50. Yup, 0.50 a bottle when you buy them two at a time. I could use about 3 bottles of shampoo and 3 bottles of conditioner right now, not 22. Buying 16 extra bottles would cost $8, $8 that I could save by not buying them at all. See what I mean? ...and see why so many couponers overspend. It's the crazy deals that kill the budget.
My solution tonight was to go ahead and buy most of those bottles and donate the extras to the food pantry. That will about max out my donation limit for the month. Conversely, that is also exactly why I have a donation limit. If I didn't, I could easily buy HBAs all month long in the name of donations.
Wednesday Feb. 8th
No spending.
Thursday Feb. 9th
No spending.
Friday Feb. 10th
I suppose I could have waited until tomorrow and to do all my shopping at once but the itch to shop was too bad! I went to Kroger three times...
Trip #1 - I had a massage therapy appointment this morning so I hit the store across the street from my massage therapist and just purchased one bottle of Herbal Essences shampoo and one bottle of Herbal Essences conditioner so I could use my Kroger ecoupon. Sometimes the ecoupons do not play well with other coupons for the same product, even if you have enough items, so I wanted to get the ecoupon off my card. Plus, I picked up my Free Friday download - a Hershey's cookie layer chocolate bar. Paid $1.00 + 0.35 tax.
The cookie layer chocolate bar lasted exactly one hour. I dedicated the first two miles of my run tonight to work it off.
Trip #2 - Kroger next to the Y. Coupon has a "limit 4 identical coupons per transaction" printed on it in RED so I bought 4 sets of shampoo and conditioner. Paid $4.00 + 1.40. The tax is killing me as all $20 worth of product gets taxed.
Trip #3 - the Kroger between the Y and the dance studio. Same transaction as #2.
Krogers #1 and #3 are big enough that I could have gone through the same store 3 times without really being noticed but I didn't have time this morning to do it at the first store and, frankly, I prefer to fly under the radar and not clean the shelf at one store. I drive EVERYWHERE, every single day... and I am lucky enough to pass most of the stores I frequent along the way so I'm really not going out of my way at all to go to different stores.
Total paid: $12.15, $3.15 of which was tax
I'm keeping 6 bottles and donating 12
I have two coupons left over. I could buy one more shampoo and conditioner set to donate and still stay under budget but I think I'll show some restraint and stop where I'm at. That way I'll have some room in case some nearly frees come along.
February Grocery Spending: $79.09
Februaray Donation Spending: $18.94
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