Monday, October 13, 2008

Learning to be Frugal

My mom has just named me "The Deal Girl" of the family. Now isn't that a lovely name? :)

So, to start my journey of finding coupons and deals to save our family money - and maybe even make a little, I ran over and took a look at Money Saving Mom and A Full Cup to see if there are any great deals anywhere (I'm a bit limited though as to what we can get, since our printer isn't working, so no printable coupons, and this is the first week I've started to save the Sunday's paper coupons, so no deals with coupons from previous adds.) I didn't really find anything great this week, but am hoping to see something next week, so I can buy (or ask Dad to buy on his way home from work) my first money saving item. :)

The way Mom has started me off in this great learning experience that I'll be able to carry with me for the rest of my life, is by instructing me in the way of keeping the coupons I save. She told me whenever I find/get coupons, I need to put them in a file folder, marked with the starting date of the coupons, and put them in the filing cabinet. Each week I need to do this, as well as weed out any coupons that have expired.

For instance: Say the date is 10/26, which is a Sunday. After stopping by mine and Mom's usual place to get our free paper and arriving at home, I take out all the coupon inserts and put them in a file folder marked 10/26. Then, I look through my oldest file folder of coupons and throw away any that are outdated. When I have a good chunk of time to spend on the computer, I go online to find great deals on stuff, and using my handy dandy coupons I've saved, paperclip them to a little slip of paper saying where and how to get the deal I've read up on. Finally, I go to the store to pick up my free, or nearly free, items. Sounds like fun to me!

Do you know any other sites, besides the ones I've said, to read up on good deals? How about your way of organizing your coupons and recent deals you'd like to take advantage of? Any tips for a coupon beginner? I would love your advise!

Thanks,

3 comments:

Grace said...

try hotcouponworld.com (I think that's the name of the site) I got some good ideas there.

Blessings,
Grace

Anonymous said...

I'm "The Deal Girl" of our family right now, and it's a lot of fun. :) I love Money Saving Mom, although I hadn't heard of A Full Cup.
I recommend that you do a google search for a frugal blog that would have in-depth coupon matches/deals for your grocery store. I use one called Fiddledeedee (for Publix), and it's helped a lot!
That's an interesting idea to store the cut coupons in a dated folder. We have all ours together and stored in our coupon box by type.
Do you have CVS and Walgreens in your area? We're glad to have lots of them close by, and I love doing the deals there.
~Princess S

Anonymous said...

Oh, I was going to say, we have a couple posts on our blog somewhere about coupons and such. They're probably filed under "Frugal."
~Princess S