Tuesday, February 9, 2010

it's a big enough umbrella

save your pennies in here


Ever since I moved to the 19th "richest" ranked county in the United States, my life-long practices have been looked upon as "strange". I am thrifty. I grew up watching my mom search for sales and clipping coupons and I have learned to do the same.


It's always been looked at a little strangely before because of my age. I would use coupons in my early twenties and people would be surprised that someone my age clipped coupons. Now I get poked fun at because Johnson County is not especially coupon country.

One day at the office I was clipping coupons on my break and acquired a crowd of jesters. One person asked me how much I could really be saving, and how could it be worth the time? I didn't really know the answer to this question. So I decided to find out (thus spending more time on coupons).

On the first of the year, I began a simple tracking log that tracks how much I spend and save. I wanted to know if coupons (matched with sales) were as good as I suspected. I just finished my data entry for January and I saved $133.74 for the month, which was a savings of 39%. I consider this a great success as I only use the coupons for things I am already going to purchase. The spreadsheet is organized by date and store, so I can see how much I save at certain stores (CVS is the best!).

I am sure I will be pretty proud to report at the end of the year how much extra I have in my pocket for rainy days from using coupons (matched with sales), fabric shopping bag rewards, and rebates (yep I send those in too).
title courtesy of The Police: every little thing she does is magic

2 comments:

Tami said...

keep up the good savings routine. it amazes me that people don't use coupons

Ashley H said...

You're awesome. I need to get back into the couponing.