I love to save money. I love a good sale. I love getting a discount.
Most women I know would probably say the same thing. I mean, does any of us really prefer to pay full price for things? I doubt it.
In the past, I’ve been known to clip a coupon or two. I would browse through the Sunday paper and if something caught my eye, I might take the time to grab a pair of scissors and cut one out. But it wasn’t something I did on a regular basis. Then Captain Carl got laid off from his job unexpectedly. And after some very thorough job searching, we realized how long it might be before he would find another one. And the panic set in.
We could lose the house!
We won’t be able to make our car payments!
How will we send the Kiddo to college?
Gahh! Ahhhhh!!!!!
Then we took a big breath, sat down and figured out a way to survive. And that is what we are doing now, two years later.
Surviving.
We took renters into our home. Not fun. Not fun at all, my friends. But we’ve managed to hang on to our home so far because of it.
We cut back on everything. And I mean, everything. We stopped eating out, we changed our phone provider to something much cheaper, we sold some things we really didn’t need, we turned up the thermostat in the summer and down in the winter. Our “fun fund” went from several hundred a month to, well…nothing. For awhile at least. Captain Carl eventually started his own business when it became clear that he would not be able to find the type of work he was doing before the economy collapsed. I changed jobs last year in order to make a couple thousand more a year. The Kiddo has taken it upon himself to earn scholarships and work his way through college.
But this post isn’t really about all that. It’s about my addiction to coupons.
Oh coupons, how I love you so! Lovely lovely, money saving scraps of paper!
When the financial bottom fell out of our world, I began to take those Sunday paper coupons seriously. I clipped each and every one and put them into my little coupon book. I started to save a few bucks at the grocery store. I decided I was an idiot for not doing this sooner.
And then I discovered online coupons.
*happy dance*
A virtual plethora of unending websites, filled to the brim with pages and pages of coupons. And all you have to do is check the box, click “print” and bam! You are drowning in a sea of $0.55 off Honey Nut Cheerios and $1.50 off two jars of salsa!
And ohmygod did you know that some grocery stores double and triple your coupons? Say what???
And! And! Some of them have their own store card that gives you additional savings. Additional, y’all!
I’m starting to sweat with the excitement of it all!
And just when I thought my coupon mania had gotten as crazy as it ever could, I discovered coupon blogs.
Holy hell.
And now? I spend my lunch hours reading coupon blogs while clipping this week’s savings from the paper and determining which ones have matching coupons online that I can print and combine for extra savings. And my desk looks like this:
This is for real, y’all. I look like a crazy person in my little cubicle with all my scraps of paper strewn around me, muttering to myself “Were the frozen peas on sale at Target or Kroger this week?”.
But I am saving money. Once week I took $125 off my $250 grocery bill. So I’m having a hard time deciding if I’m going too far with this. Am I obsessing too much? Is an extra $30in my pocket this week worth spending this much of my free time planning? I’m not sure. All I know is that this is not the face of a sane human being:
No sir, it is not.
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