Maine Nesties
Dear Community,
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
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Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Extreme Couponing
Have any of you watched this show? I'm watching the first episode.
These people are absolutely nuts.
I'm all for saving. But when you need to lose weight...why would you buy 150 Butterfingers just because they are free?? One woman bought stuff that she actually would use...a chicken roaster, soup, etc. which I think is really cool. A lot of them are buying a bunch of sh!t. Like these nasty ass noodle boxes. Just because it is free does not mean you should consume it.
Effing crazies.
Re: Extreme Couponing
I watched it too and I agree. They are hoarders! The random stuff that they buy and have way too many of is just nuts.
I will admit the show inspired me to start using coupons more often and checking out sales to match them up to, but I promise I will only buy useful things and won't get more than 2!
I was watching this show earlier today too. While I'm really impressed by how much they save, 95% of it is stuff I would never buy or at least stuff that I don't use often since don't eat much processed food in our house. Also if we had 30 bags of chips just sitting in the house (in addition to all the other crap), DH and I would be huge! I also have no desire to spend 70 hours a week clipping coupons and visiting couon sites like the one woman or spending 5 hours at the grocery store like one of the other ones. No thanks! I'd get a second job to save on groceries before I did that!
The show has however, inspired me as well, to start looking at some coupon sites for things I may need such as trash bags, cleaning supplies and toiletries. The one site I saw today had Body wash at Target which is on clearance and when you combine it with a coupon you can get for free. Not too shabby!
I watched that one today and it was actually 1100 boxes!! Very cool!
These people are CRAZY! but one of the gals who was featured on the Today show made a valid point. If she coupons and saves 99% of her total it's like getting an hourly wage. If she saved $600 and spent 10 hours working on the collecting the coupons and shopping, that's $60 an hour AND she has the groceries to boot.
Jackie- there are coupon clipping services where you can pay pennies for 40 of one coupon. I was just on a forum who asked - how much John Frieda are you getting? I didn't catch the jist but apparently it's free somewhere....
Most of these crazies actually make money on product which means they get their produce free. Insane and I certainly don't have time nor space for this kind of craziness, but I will fully admit I went crazy the first time I really saved a butt load.
I do love it when they shop and donate - especially working at the soup kitchen last weekend. I could totally get into that :-)
Some of them I think don't eat much in the way of fresh meats or produce but there are ways to use couponing to get those items cheaper, too. One way would be with a coupon overage, which some stores allow. For example, a bottle of salad dressing is on sale for $1 and you have a $1.50 coupon, you just made $0.50 to apply to your other groceries. If you have 50 coupons, you've just gotten yourself 50 bottles of salad dressing plus $25 worth of any other groceries.
Another way is to watch for promotions where you get a coupon to use toward your next visit. Sometime Shaw's will have something like "buy 4 boxes of cereal and get a $4.00 coupon to use on your next visit." Those coupons are valid on any purchase.
Totally didn't know this.
The only reason my MIL doesn't go crazy with coupons is that she's too lazy. But she is completely the type to buy things just because they're on sale. (And then try to offload some of it on us!)
It's unbelievable what she will buy "because it was on sale" or "it was double coupon day."
Some people really work it well, though-- and that's pretty impressive...
I've been watching the shows and saw on some blogs that it isn't reality - that the store policies don't allow people to use that many of one type of coupon, or the doubling or tripling of that may coupons, etc. I've been following some couponing blogs for months now and I just can't figure out how to make it work like they do. I do save some good money on things at Walgreens, but I would have to go to two different grocery stores each week to save MAYBE $20.
I might have to check out those clipping services, but, seriously, even following those blogs, I feel like I never really find much stuff for free - like the people on that show had tissues, toilet paper, paper towels, etc they bought for free. I don't remember ever seeing that stuff for free. And I was jealous of the one-girl's stash of wheat thins :P It seems like it's usually air fresheners or hand soap that's free.
Oh, and I just have to make fun of that one woman who was like, "I like to do myself up before I go shopping. People think I'm rich, for some reason." She certainly did think highly of herself, and her hair was all fried and she wore sooo much eyeshadow. [/cattyness]
The woman who bought all of the candy bars mad me sad. She definitely seemed like she had a problem, the way she talked about how she gives up life to go shopping and gets a rush and stuff. It definitely sounds like it can be a bad addiction.
This is nice to hear. When I was watching the other night and wondering how much food they waste because they buy so much. Some of it must expire before they get to eat it.
I really want to start using more coupons but not for a bunch of chips and 55 bottles of mustard!
I was looking on some coupon blogs yesterday while I was watching the show (I clearly have no life), and the one blog had a big write up about how they claimed this woman was committing coupon fraud. Apparently she was using coupons for the wrong products, but because of the way the barcodes were set up the store did not catch it. I guess stores are going to be changing the way they create coupon bar codes now because of people doing this.
Ahhh. Thank you for explaining - I've also wondered about claims I've heard about people using "coupon savings" for fresh foods!
I haven't watched this show but my sister has been telling me to watch it. She says she and her fiance watch in amazement at the extremes people go to. I LOVE the idea of donating purchases made with coupons!