April went by in a haze of Spring Break, realizing that preschool graduation was only 2 1/2 weeks after Spring Break and my kids weren't ready, (commence MAJOR panicking) my co-teacher's father getting seriously ill and me dealing with a round-robin of subs (thank heavens my friend Jamie was available- she knew a lot of the songs we were singing; thank you Primary Songbook!) Easter parties, Easter, car malfunctions derailing Easter, stupid state-mandated CRCT testing, graduation itself and a big field trip. Then to top it all off I got a cold. I'm glad it's over and done.
Next week is my last week of school for the year. Suh-weet. They did great in our preschool graduation- seriously, they were awesome. I love the little buggers but I'm *tired*. May brings family stuff (birthdays and baby showers) the Family Reunion, more graduations, end of the year parties, Honors Days, more field trips, packing up parts of my classroom and for some reason teachers keep assigning MAJOR projects. WHy not just give the kids a test and be done with it. Let's not get creative and overthink it here at the end, shall we?
But I know why you're here. You want to know about my couponing exploits, don't you?? Yeah you do!!
I tried to keep up with everything by taking pictures of all of my shopping hauls, but it got to be a pain. And I'm lazy. Still the picks are on my harddrive, and what kind of couponer/blogger would I be if I didn't share them with you? A lousy one!
This was a CVS purchase. Total cost was $38.84, but I spent 14.91 Out of Pocket (OOP). One thing that I learned during this whole
"WILL COUPONING REALLY SAVE ME ANY MONEY?" thing was about razors. I don't know if y'all realize this, but razors are NOT cheap! We have four people in this house using razors, so we tend to go through them. James doesn't like electric shavers and disposable razors tear us his face. The brand of razor he uses currently isn't even a fancy-scmancy five blade deal, but a refill pack of 8 cartridges costs almost $20. On one of the couponing sites I frequent it said that in order to get the best deals on razors, watch for sales and coupons for ANY razor and then buy the refills as they are on sale.
I don't know why I didn't think of that before, but it was seriously a revalation for me. I was SHOCKED to see how many sales AND coupons on razors and/or catridges there were over the course of the month. So now we have a stockpile of five different kinds of razors and probably 40 or so refill cartridges, and I only spent about $25 OOP. In the future I can look for sales and stock up the catridges as necessary without worrying about the brand of razor because we most likely already have it! And how sad is this? We have a razor basket in the closet to store the razors when we are out of refills.
Another CVS run. $99.21 in product, 35.69 OOP.
This is from a BIG Publix run. At first I was really concentrating on getting out of the store with spending as little as possible. That is still my overall goal, but it's not the only thing I'm concentrating on now. We've never had a huge amount of food storage. Years of moving and living with family never made it really practical. But now that we are settled, it's important to start building up those supplies.
We lucked out that, in April, we had an extra paycheck. I decided to concentrate on stocking up on as much as I could for during April and May since I won't have a paycheck again until September once school is out. I'll worry about the bottom line during the summer and stock up now while we have the financial means.
So this Publix run was $397.24 in product and $222.24 OOP. And as you can see, that included meat, fresh produce and dairy items. Madeline had to pose with the receipt to show you how long it was!
What's the bottom line, though? I estimated that I spend between $400-$500 a month on groceries, household supplies, healt and beauty stuff, etc. I definitely went past that! But as I said, I decided to focus on stocking up as much as I could.
At CVS I got
$693.76 worth of product, but I spent
$249.51. My math skills are horrid, but I think that's a savings of 75%, and I have $20 in Extra Care Bucks that rolled over to May. I don't think I did too bad.
One awesome thing that came out of all this is that I got most of my household and health and beauty supplies at CVS. Normally, this is the stuff I would buy at Target, along with all sorts of other things that would find its way into my buggy! That didn't happen at CVS, so I saved money that way, too. If I had bought everything at regular price, or even on sale, the prices would have definitely been more at CVS. But because I 1)watched the sales 2)combined with coupons and 3) used Extra Care Bucks, I spent less that I would have at Target. We now have a GREAT supply of soap, toothpaste, toothbrushes, razors, shampoo, toilet paper, paper towels, cleaning supplies and over-the-counter medicine.
At Publix I got $
1341.64 worth of product, but I spent
$782.67 out of pocket. Included in this total is cat and dog food, which I normally would have bought at Target, but because of coupons and sales I ended up buying at Publix. At the end of the month my fridge was full, the pets have extra food, our chest freezer was well-stocked and the pantry has more in it than it ever has before.
My grand total between both stores was
$1032.18 OOP, (and I got close to
$2000 worth of product) almost double what I estimated I would spend in a month. Do I want that total to go down?? Absolutely!! But I'm fairly confident we could eat a nutrious and varied diet for the next month and not spend more than another $25 on fresh produce, milk and bread. But most importantly,
WE WOULDN'T RUN OUT OF TOILET PAPER!!!!
So the big question becomes: IS COUPONING WORTH IT?? In the short term, I bought more and spent more that I normally would have, but I wanted to build our supplies. I didn't "rob Peter to pay Paul" in order to afford it, either. I went to the stores more often that I would have (usually I would only go every two weeks, when payday comes around), but knowing there would be sales I wanted to take advantage of made me 1)plan my budget better and 2) plan my grocery lists and menus. These are all good things.
What about the time I spent cutting, searching, printing, planning and organizing all thouse coupons?? At first it wasn't hard because I didn't have a lot of coupons. Now that I know 'how to play the game', so to speak, I have a *LOT* more. Consequently it takes me more time to get ready to go to the store. I estimate at least 10 hours a week, maybe 15.
Luckily both Publix and CVS list on your receipt how much you saved, just in coupons, in addition to how much you saved altogether. I think this is a pretty good gauge of seeing if the "time" is worth the "money".
All total, my savings on coupons alone came to
$435.41. Let's say I spent 10 hours a week for the five weeks in April. That means for every hour I spent "couponing" I "made" $8.70. Frankly, that's more than I make at my REAl job, LOL!!!
I'm definitely not an EXTREME COUPONER (and most of those people are abusing the system) but I think I've made a good start.
