I don’t know about you, but we are always looking to save a buck. I have no problem admitting that like a good portion of Americans we currently live paycheck to paycheck. With Clarissa in school, student loans and cost of living expenses things can get a little hairy at times. We have had to learn to cut costs where we can. This means couponing.
Now I have never been one to coupon. I’ve actually always associated it with grandmothers and big families. However, money is money so when I heard that one of my work colleague cut her grocery bills in half I was ready to jump on the bandwagon. Her method, which she learned about in a class, is simple. It’s based around the theory that, “if you don’t see it, you won’t know you have it.” To start all you need is a 3 ring binder, some baseball card holder pages, page dividers and a Sunday paper. Put the baseball pages in your binder and divide the sections however you want.
My work friend’s binder is super specific. She has sections for bread, milk, sauces, meat, veggies and so on. I went a little less specific for our book. I categorized my sections based on the aisles of the grocery store I frequent the most. The best part is you can do whatever works best for you. I actually had to change mine around after my first few shopping trips because I realized I could make my trip flow faster by rearranging. Next, cut out all the coupons from your Sunday paper, even the ones you think you would never use. Believe me you’ll be kicking yourself if you find out you threw away a coupon for an item you could have got for free with it. Finally, put the coupons in the baseball card pages based on the sections you created for yourself. Every Sunday I buy a paper and cut out the coupons while I watch football. Then as I insert them into my book I scan my sections for expired ones. Normally there aren’t that many. The whole process takes me between 20 minutes to an hour based on the volume of new coupons I have.

Now that you have a place to keep your coupons, you’re ready to shop. The idea behind saving a lot of money is to combine coupon savings with sales. I use an internet site called Southern Savers to find out the best deals in my area, but I would reason to bet that there is someone in your area that runs a similar site. I also joined the email club for my grocery store. They send me their weekly ads and special offers. My grocery store also offers double coupons up to .99 cents everyday and often runs deals where they triple your savings. People always comment that we must buy a lot of things we don’t need and honestly we went a little crazy at first because we could get things we could never afford in the past. Over time we learned to stock up on certain items like canned goods, soup broths, dressings, marinades and cleaning items. We only buy the perishable items that we really need to get us through a two-week span. Now I refuse to spend more than fifty cents for most of the items I just listed. Clarissa and I both have a blast trying to figure out how we can get the stuff we want for the cheapest price. Lately I started making a list of the things we want most so that we have an idea of how much we’re going to spend per trip. I loaded all my info into an excel spreadsheet and it does all the calculations for me. Thank God because I really stink in the math department.

During our most recent trip we purchased $158 worth of groceries and spent $46. This also included some items that weren’t on my list that Clarissa snuck in like beer, sodas, ground beef and some other non coupon items. We figured out that these came out to roughly $15 bucks so without them we would have paid $31 bucks for $143 dollars worth of stuff. Now tell me you couldn’t spend an hour a week to save money like that? You should try it. I promise your wallets will thank me.















I swear I have been looking forward to this event for the last 2 months and it did not disappoint. It’s been 4 days and I don’t know if my stomach still hurts from wrestling myself or from laughing so hard as I watched everyone else do it. Dawn and Ashley kicked off the day in the first bought. We quickly realized that suiting up was best done in groups as the costumes could get a little unwieldy at times. I think the 40 or so onlookers would agree with me when I say that this match may have to be one of the most entertaining things I have ever seen. I nearly peed my pants from laughter. This was a quick one though because Dawn is surprisingly bad at sumo wrestling. Hmmm, who would have known?






































































