Cutting Costs by Cutting Coupons

This story recently appeared in the Litchfield Independent Review, who graciously agreed to let me reprint it on my blog.

Author: Andrew Wig

Cindy Haugland’s basement resembles a dimly lit, modestly stocked convenience store.

A dozen or so spray bottles of cleaning solution sit on one shelf. The next shelf over is for a wide variety of salad dressings. Below that are pasta products — boxes of macaroni and cheese, and ramen

noodles. The toiletries go on the other side of the room, where the toiletpaper is stacked next to the squeeze bottles of body wash and sticks of deodorant, lined up in rows. It is a lot of stuff, she admitted, but she had a coupon. Haugland of Hutchinson always thought herself a frugal shopper, gravitating toward generic brands during trips to the grocery store. For several years, she has focused on organizing homes and businesses with her company, Tidy Tightwads, but it was a year and a half ago that she discovered the power of the scissors.That was when she began the strategic clipping and collating, filing away into binders the coupons, good for $1 off a box of Band-Aids here, and 50 cents off yogurt there.

The coupons stay filed away until the time is ripe — usually when the goods are on sale — to score the most outrageous deal.“I’m to the point right now where I’m saving more than I’m spending,” Haugland said. “I would say I have cut my grocery bill in half, for sure.”And she is passing on her knowledge. She will teach a Litchfield Community Education and Recreation class, “Extreme Couponing Strategies,” on Sept. 20. Saving large sums of money often means purchasing much more than she immediately needs, hence the basement grocery store, but Haugland said she saved $2,000 in a recent nine-month period, using the savings to help fund a family trip to Washington, D.C.

How she does it

It just takes some organization, patience, diligence — and shelf space. First, the coupons must be amassed. The Internet is one source, where sites like coupons.com offer an assortment of deals that can be printed. A main supply line for Haugland are the inserts that come with the Sunday newspaper. She gets three per week delivered to her house.“It took me a while to get that communicated to the Star Tribune that I really wanted three of the same papers,” she said. “The paper boy brought them and he’s like, ‘Do you really want three of the same paper?”

She thinks of it as an investment. It costs her $100 for a 26-week subscription, but Haugland said she will save that much in one shopping trip. She spends about two hours on Sunday nights devouring the papers’ glossy innards, tearing past the news to get to the coupon inserts. Then, she maximizes those coupons’ value by “stacking” them, using the manufacturers’ coupons from the newspaper along with store-specific ones. This is where the real deals can be had.For instance, Haugland said, perhaps a $3 box of Band-Aids could be free by piling a $1-off manufacturer’s coupon on top of a $2-off coupon from Walgreens.

One receipt from a recent trip, which she said was not unusual, shows a purchase of $53.04 worth of dental floss, napkins, cereal, peanut butter and spaghetti sauce — all for $8.76. This is modest in comparison to those portrayed on cable TV’s The Learning Channel’s popular show, “Extreme Couponing,” in which hardcore coupon clippers take home several cartloads of goods for a small fraction of the actual cost. “I was really excited to watch it, and then when I saw the first episode, I was like, ‘Aww, I’m really disappointed, because they make the regular couponer look bad,” Haugland said. “Everything was so extreme. I mean a shopping cart full of toothbrushes and that kind of thing.”

Even though her class is called “Extreme Couponing Strategies,” it’s not as extreme as it could be, and Haugland wishes not to be lumped in with the more compulsive and voracious couponers. “I kind of teach it in moderation,” she said. “I don’t want people to call me six months from now and say, ‘Help me, I’ve turned into a hoarder.’”

Another highly motivated couponer lives just outside Litchfield city limits. Darlene Jewell receives income support from state disability checks, and while costs have risen, the amount written on the checks hasn’t.“For me, it’s a necessity,” Jewell said, but added the extent of her couponing is limited by a slim selection of shopping options in Litchfield.But Jewell finds value where she can, and is trying to pass her coupon savvy on to her grown children. She gives them to her 24-year old son to put them in his billfold, “so when he goes to the grocery store he has to use them,” Jewell said. “He probably wouldn’t care, but I nag him so much, so he uses them.”

A public image battle

Couponer Abbey Lang of Dassel, who also has a room devoted to her coupon-gotten stockpile, harbors similar feelings toward the TLC television show “Extreme Couponing” and those it depicts. “It’s a fun show to watch, and it’s entertaining, but it’s not realistic.

It’s also created this backlash for people that do want to legitimately coupon,” Lang said. “There was this ripple effect (when the show began last year) that went through the whole couponing community.” As for the quantity she purchases, she draws a line. “There’s stockpiling, and then there’s excessive hoarding,” Lang said.

Both she and Haugland say they don’t normally buy things they wouldn’t use anyway, and if they do, they donate it. Lang finds extra incentive to use coupons with the four young children she has to support. Even her children, between ages 4 and 8, are couponers, with a focus on the candy section, she said. Lang spotted a teachable moment recently when, overcome by temptation, one of the children put $1 into a vending machine for a package of Starburst. “They just had to have that Starburst for $1. So, that weekend, they were on sale at Walgreens, and I got that huge bag for $1,” Lang said. That showed them. The children realized, “look at all these Skittles and Starburst you can get for $1,” Lang said. “It was like this light bulb went off in their head.”

Dedicated coupon-users aren’t helped by recent reports in some regions across the country of “extreme couponers” stealing newspapers — and th coupons within — to support their habit. And then there are the looks they get. Lang can feel the stares and almost hear eyes rolling in their sockets when she approaches the checkout with “two four-inch binders, and you have a stack of coupons that are an inch-thick. You have people behind you that are like, ‘Really?” Lang fights off the resentment by being polite and apologetic. “You have to kill them with kindness,” she said. And sometimes, she added, derision can turn into awe when they see how much money she saves. Although Lang hasn’t counted it up, she said she has saved “thousands and thousands of dollars” in her year of heavy, strategic couponing.