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Coupons!
As promised a getting started primer for couponing:
Step 1: Get Coupons
- The best places to get coupons are the Sunday paper (in with the ads), online printable coupons from websites like Red Plum, Coupons.com, and pretty much any website you stumble over with a printable coupon (manufacturer websites and Facebook pages are good places to find these.) You can also get coupons in store-ads and in stores on products or in those little coupon machines.
Tip for getting the Sunday paper: The Dollar Tree sells the Sunday paper for $1 each, everywhere else they are $2. (See! Already saving money!) I buy two papers every week so that just in case there is an awesome deal I can get two - buy more if you want or buy just one.
Step 2: Understand the difference between manufacturer vs. store coupons
There are two kinds of coupons - those issued by the manufacturer good on a certain product at any store and those issued by stores which are good for a certain product or money off only at the issuing store. It is important to know/understand the difference between these two types of coupons because one of the best ways to save a ton of money on products is combining these coupons.
Step 3: Organize Your Coupons
Do whatever works for you - clip all the coupons and put them into baseball card sleeves in a binder (a lot of effort in the beginning - might be worth seeing if you like it first), keep the coupon inserts from the paper intact and file them by date in an accordion file, keep them in a stack on your table by date. However you want to do it. The important things are that you know where your coupons are and what date they were in the papers - this will VERY helpful to you when you need to search for them quickly
Step 4: Understanding Sale Cycles
Step 5: Where do you want to shop?
When you are first starting out, it is a lot easier to focus on one grocery store and one drugstore rather than trying to get deals at every store. Even if you just do Walgreens and Kroger, you will still get excellent deals. Will you miss some deals elsewhere? Yes, but unless you have a ton of time in the beginning, it is easier to learn on a couple stores than ten stores and the deals will come again - something is ALWAYS on sale.
Step 6: Match the Deals
If you are a big DIY person, you can pull out your coupons and match them up by hand to the sales ads...or you can use the internet to do it for you. The easiest way to do this is to google "Store name coupon matchups DFW" A bunch of blogs will pop up showing you the coupon matchups for the store you like to shop at. It is important to include DFW in the search so you don't get ready to go shopping with the New England deals. A few popular blogs for this are Wild For Wags (Walgreens), The Krazy Coupon Lady, Hip2Save, Fabulessly Frugal, Delicious Finds (DFW Area Blogger). There are a lot more blogs, too many to mention...
Another really great resource is A Full Cup's coupon database (you have to register to use it), which lets you search for a coupon for anything. It will tell you if there is a printable available or it will tell you where in your newspaper coupon books you can find a coupon for that product. This is helpful if you know that you must buy something and know you don't have a coupon for it - sometimes you will find a printable to tack onto your purchase.
For reference, the drugstore ads come out on Sunday and run through the next Sunday and most grocery store ads come out Wednesday and run through the next Wednesday.
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I will write another post with the actual details for shopping and to explain some of the quirks of drugstores soon. This one took awhile and I didn't want to overwhelm you guys with info. 
This week is a little bit of a bummer for starting couponing (sorry girls!) because there will be no coupon inserts in the Sunday paper due to Memorial Day. This only happens 4 times a year and this happens to be one of those weekends. There might be one insert in there, so grab a paper if you are out, but don't make a special trip this week. If you are out and happen to see a paper from last Sunday somewhere this week, grab it, there are coupons in it.
Re: Coupons!
It seems a bit overwhelming...
~TTC Buddies with akcrrr and amandaf6383~
Natural Cycle (8/7/13)- BFP! Beta #1 (9/10/13): 509 Progesterone: 18.64 Beta #2 (9/12/13): 1118
I promise it is really not. I will make it easy for you guys to get started. Just get some coupons and when I come back from vacation next Monday we will go for it and I will help you guys.
Lacey - Maybe you could pick a few items that cost you the most and start with those. For me, it really irks me to pay so much for paper towels, toilet paper, and cleaning supplies.
Side note: I can't believe I am giving couponing advice.
Heehee!
Thanks so much, this is awesome! I tried the Grocery Gamer one time and that didn't go so well... Way too time consuming. This sounds a lot more manageable to just focus on one or two stores at first.