Moreover, most of my groceries are food, and I’ve yet to see coupons anywhere for fresh tomatoes and lettuce and apples, etc.

I guess it’s a winning strategy if you want to live on 36 boxes of Kraft Dinner a week. But otherwise, nope. Doesn’t work.

Also, it doesn’t matter how much you SAVE, it’s how much you SPEND. If you save $8000 a year for a family of three, but are still spending $7000 a year, you are still spending more than me.

I used to use coupons, and I could save a bundle. But then I changed my eating habits. It got to the point that the only coupons I would use are for deodorant (once/year), toothpaste (once/year), shampoo (twice/year), salsa, and pasta.

We buy large bags of beans and rice and flour at Costco (yes, cheaper), and canned tomatoes in the #10 can. Coupons don’t come close. Same with cheese. Even stores with cheese on sale combined with a coupon doesn’t match the <$2/lb at Costco.

The bulk of our grocery purchases are fresh fruits and veggies: $20 a week from the CSA, and another $15 or $20 from the farmer’s market or local produce stand. I’m not really even willing to buy the “loss leaders” at the grocery store for produce.

I like whole wheat pasta. About every couple of months I could find the magical combination of sale + coupon that would get it to be cheaper than Trader Joe’s. That was a lot of work for not a lot of output.

I buy spices at the Mexican grocery store for 70 cents. I buy free range eggs from the Farmer’s Market or TRader Joe’s if I can’t get to the market. There has never been a coupon for eggs in the paper that gets the price to below TJ’s. And that’s for regular eggs. Sandwich bread is cheapest on the day-old rack at the grocery store or Costco if it’s empty. Coupons haven’t managed to touch those prices.

I buy 32 oz tubs of plain yogurt. NO coupons. Oats are $0.79/lb at Whole foods, and rarely do oats go on sale for cheaper anywhere else. I found that when I went from regular eating + coupons to whole food eating with no coupons, my grocery bill stayed about the same, maybe went down a small amount. And I’ve been tracking my grocery spending for a decade.

Coupon clipping isn’t just about the money off of a product, it’s about finding sales, price matching stores and doubling days. These might not make much difference for a family of 2 or 3 but 6 people use a lot of soap, shampoo, toothpaste, detergent, hairspray, sanitary items, medicine, razors, diapers (!), meat, oats, milk, rice, yogurt, frozen veggies, etc.

I’d say give it a try. You can only save money.

-12 boxes of cereal (6 for home and 6 for donation to the local food bank)

-all my fresh fruits and vegetables for the week

….and $6.

A “Buy 4 get $4″ store promotion combined with manufacturer’s coupons, combined with manufacturer’s sponsored catalina deal profited me $3 which I used for my fresh fruits and veggies, but it could just as easily have been eggs, milk, beans, rice etc.

This is just one example of what many of us do on a regular basis.

My time is worth at minimum $20/hr. I donate money to foodbanks.

I did go through the coupons that came in the mail this week, just like I did the first few months we lived here. Still nothing.

I have seen – and used – coupons in the past year for milk, flour, sugar, canned fruit, canned veggies, frozen veggies, spices.

Those are all (ahem) healthy foods, appropriate for those who cook for scratch.

the message boards will tell you what is going on sale next week and which coupons to match up and people really get into creating different couponing “scenarios” to use each week to maximize the savings.

Take a look at a small part that “Couponing for Community” was able to donate to different shelters, food pantries, stamp out hunger and others. And don’t tell me that at least one item is used by your families in a weekly menu basis.

http://secure.smilebox.com/ecom/openTheBox?sendevent=4d5459334d4441304d7a6b3d0d0a&blogview=true&campaign=blog_playback_link

But when we do use coupons, I regularly take the savings and put it in our Entertainment Envelope. It’s not much … but it helps.

Bill

I’d be very curious to see one of your sister’s grocery lists for such a money-saving expedition. Like others who’ve already posted, I haven’t found coupons to be very useful to me, so I’m interested in comparing a coupon-saver’s haul to one of my own from the grocery store.

Or, is buying around the edges and buying the store brand, basically that 20%? That’s what I do now.

The only one people ever brought in was for water softening salt.

I use thecouponclippers dot com to buy coupons sometimes, but only on a very few items (the farmer’s market and dairy gets most of my shopping dollars).
The flaw in that site is that I’ll buy the coupon then can’t find the product. The coupons are only a few cents a piece so I do come out ahead in the end, but It’s not really worth it to me.