How I Became a Coupon Convert and Saved Money Grocery Shopping

I have always loved getting bargains and over time it's become almost like a hobby and quite enjoyable. I hardly ever used coupons, because I believed that if you bought generic brands or other brands that were on sale, you'd save more money than if you were to use a coupon. However, last weekend I decided to give coupons a shot.

Saturday night I found my coupons from the previous week's Sunday paper. I also went through the ads and circulars that we get in the mail each week. I decided on going to Giant because they have a little day care center that you can take your kids to. My daughter is too young (16 months) but my son is 6 and loves to go. It gives him time to play and I have time to concentrate on grocery shopping. A lot of us spend too much when we have little ones around, because we just grab and go. If your local grocery stores have day cares, I highly recommend taking advantage!

I got out a tablet, cut out all the coupons and I wrote down all the sales from the Giant ad that we needed. The ad also contained 4 triple coupons and a coupon to get 4 boxes of Post cereal for $10 plus a free gallon of milk. The best part was it could be any size cereal. In my tablet I wrote out the entire grocery list and I put notes next to the item if it was on sale and if I had a coupon. I also seperated all my coupons so I'd know where they were as I shopped.

It turns out, that a lot of stuff I had coupons for were also on sale! Since it was Labor day weekend, there was some great sales and I was able to take big advantage of them with the manufacturer's coupons, triple coupons and bonuscard savings. When I go grocery shopping, I try to get enough for 2 weeks and stop just once for milk or bread in between shopping trips and I usually try to keep it at $100 a week and that includes toilet paper, razors, soap, laundry detergent, etc. At the end of our grocery shopping, we had a huge cart full of stuff! Lots of fruit, vegetables and meat along with staple items and non food items. My husband was trying to keep track in his head as we went along how much we were spending. He's really awesome at math and since we forgot the calculator, he tried to keep track. He thought it was going to be about $180 and I thought around the same.

It turns out, that before the coupons and bonuscard savings it was $178 and then once they took everything off it went down to $117! I was floored! Our freezer is stuffed with frozen vegetables and meat, our cupboards are all stocked up full and there's plenty of stuff for my husband to take to work and pack my son's lunches with!

It turns out that I had so many $1.00 coupons, that I was only able to use 1 of my triple coupons, so I had 3 left over. A few days later, we were already running low on milk, so I thought I'd go back to the grocery store, get more milk and take advantage of the rest of my triple coupons before they expired in just a few days. While I was getting a grocery cart, I glanced at the one beside it and in the bottom was another get 4 cereals and a free milk coupon! I immediately snatched it up and thought, "Why not get more cereal and stock up and since I already need more milk..."

I ended up only spending $18 and I got 4 boxes of family size cereal, a gallon of milk, a frozen pizza, jello with fruit (for my son's lunches), a big size dish washing liquid, 2 Lysol Neutra Air sprays and a Lysol kitchen spray! It would have been $40! We are now set until our next shopping trip and maybe longer!

So as it turns out, I spent $135, which is $15 less than my budget and I got almost twice as much than I normally buy when I was just getting generic brands. I know I won't always do this good with coupons since a lot of it had to do with that week's sales, but I am now officially a coupon convert and will utilize them as much as I can! I now know that if I just spend a half an hour every other week to plan out our meals, organize coupons, take note of any sales and especially take advantage of holidays sales, I can save a lot of money with coupons!