February Couponing

Now that Febuary has pretty much come to an end ( can you believe we are already down 2 months this year!!!!) I wanted to see how well I did in my coupon expenditures. The outcome.....Total we should have spent - $1013 and the total we actually spent was - $415. That is a savings of 59%. Or an average of $103 a week. Plus I still have 5 - $3.00 Dayton coupons for Fry's to redeem in March. Not bad for a family of six. Especially since I am still learning the ins and outs of this whole coupon thing.

My goals for March is to stick to stockpiling Free to 80% savings. To use what we have unless we Need something. To try to keep from impulse coupon buying. To only have spent $250 and to have tithed our full 10%. We only Tithed $250 this month and should have Tithed $300ish. And this was a low income month for us.

Extreme Couponing

So I have been super busy so far this year. One of my main thrills has been coupon shopping. I have dabbled a little in it before but this year I have gotten serious with it. One of my bad habbits is compulsively shopping and now that I have been couponing and have realized how many things you can get for free or close to it I feel like I am having my cake and eating it too. What I mean by that is now I am able to go shopping and get A LOT of stuff that I want and normally wouldn't buy for me because of the price but spend very little. I am also learning to plan ahead (something I have always been horrible at). I am lucky that my husband's mother was an extreme couponer too so he is used to this way of thinking and is very patient with me about it.

Okay so here is my latest shopping trip. I went to Safeway tonight and stocked up on

• 8 - 2 month bounce dryer bars (16 months worth) @ $2.99 each - reg $6.99
• 2 gain dryer sheets and 8 Gain liquid fabric softener (at least another years worth) @ $ .49 each - reg. $5.49 ,
• 5 blistex chap stick (if the kids don't loose them a year worth) @ FREE - reg. $1.59,
• 21 - 4 ct pudding cups ( a total of 84 cups of pudding but I have no idea how long those will last in a family of 3 kids :) ) @ $.67 each - reg. $ 1.39
• 5 boxes of granola bars ( a total of 25 bars and again who knows how long those will last) @ $ .50 each - reg. $3.99
• 6 - 64oz Sunny D juice @ $ .29 each - reg. $1.99
• 8 Loreal kids shampoo ( these should last us about a year) @ $ .89 each - reg. $ 3.79
• 16 pasta sides and rice sides @ $ .38 each - reg. $ 1.89
• 8 - 16 oz Whiskas cat food @ $ .75 - reg. 2.49

I also got some other items but those were my "stocking up" items and the ones I saved the most on. So the grand total that I spent was $118. 88 and my grand total savings was $212.76 . So I should have spent $331.64 but instead I saved 64% on my total order. That makes me happy. Now as you can see I am not one of those people that can go buy $400 worth of groceries and only spen $3.00. I don't know how they do that but I am quite happy with the money I have saved my family. So I like to look at it as I just brought home $212.76 because this is my other job.

I can't wait to see how much we are able to save by the end of this year!!!!