Using Coupons- Crash Course - Part II

Now that you have your coupons in order time to start scanning the ads for sales. There are three ways that you can do this. You can either get the Sunday paper and make your shopping list to coincide with your monthly menu plans that we talked about here. Once you have your shopping list then you can pull the approriate coupons. The is the cheapest by being free as you can access the paper from a friend or some other free method.

The second way is to look online at the sale ads for your favorite stores. Another free way to get the informaiton but you need to be comfortable with scanning websites and copying information down. I did this before and it is somewhat time consuming but worth it in the end.

The third way and the one I recommend is using the Grocery Game. This site lets you access all the sales and coupons ofr your stores. What I love is that it is color coded with best lowest prices in blue and free items in gree. All the items are listed with the price, sale price, the coupon that you can apply and the new price. All you need to do is check the items that you want to print on your list, pull the coupons from your handy coupon binder and you are all set to shop. This is reasonable - $1o.00/8 weeks for one store and $15.00/8 weeks for two stores. I personally only shop at two grocery stores so this seems like a good price to me and a time saver at that! Right now you can try the Grocery Game for $1.00 for 30 days and if you don't like it cancel. I recommend at least trying it.

Yes, if you find it works you will have to spend some moeny to obtain this service but look at it this way:

• This will save you a bunch of time that you do not have - time = money


• You will easily recoup this amount in savings - she has a staff that monitor all the possible deals. If you are doing it you are guaranteed to miss something. Let the experts do it. Kind of like changing the oil in my car. Would I attempt to save money by changing it myself? No, becasue I would have no idea what I was doing and I would probably mess something up, not to mention I would spend twice as much of my valuable time doing it. I think the money would be well spent letting the "experts" do what they know how to do.


• This is money spent for something useful. You are not buying a new shirt. This is something that will help you save, a tool - that makes it worth the money coming out of your budget.

Stay tuned for Part II of this series.