extreme couponing

yes, there are 45 cans of soup

This past weekend I had my first experience with Extreme Couponing.  We had a speaker come to MOPS recently who shared with us how to get lots of food for just pennies.  There were some skeptics among us, but several of us were very intrigued and ready to jump in.  After reading blogs like this and this and this, I was fairly confident that extreme savings was possible.  The particular couponing techniques that she shared with us uses a combination of sale items, coupons in bulk, doubling coupons, and generating Catalina (CAT) check-out coupons (money off your next purchase) then ’rolling’ these Catalina deals over and over again.  Confused yet?  Yeah, I know. 

So, Shaw’s was running a CAT special on General Mills products this week.  Buy $20 of these certain products, that were on sale, and you would receive a $7 CAT (check-out coupon).  But keep in mind, it was $20 of products based on their shelf price, not the current sale price, plus you could use coupons on top of the sale prices.  The goal was to find items that had a significant difference in their sale price and shelf price and then try to find coupons for those items.  Once you figure out a scenario or plan you do as many transactions as you wish in ‘$20′ chunks and apply the $7 CAT to your next ‘$20′ transaction. 

I found my Shaw’s info at the forum on A Full Cup and purchased some coupons in bulk here.  After crunching some numbers with hubby’s graphing calculator, chatting with my gals, and visiting our local coupon yahoo group I had my plans ready to go.  My goal was to stock up on items from the sale that we will eat (there is no point in me getting stuff that I don’t want in the house, or that we won’t user or eat, just because it is a great deal) and that happened to be Progresso Soup, brownies, cake mix, and frosting.(Yes, I know I am in the midst of Losing It, but cake mix lasts forever, right?)  Since the soup was a ‘money maker’ (my out-of-pocket cost was less than the $7 CAT I was going to get back and use toward the next transaction), I added some of our weekly grocery items to my purchases like produce and yogurt so that it would add up to over $7 since you can’t get money back on your check-out coupon. 

Here are the stats for my extreme couponing adventure: 

• I had a total of 9 transactions over the course of 3 visits to Shaw’s
• I got 45 cans of Progresso Soup, 6 boxes of Betty Crocker Brownies, 11 boxes of Betty Crocker Cake Mix, 10 tubs of Betty Crocker Frosting, yogurt, 2lbs of apples, 3lbs of pears, bag of lettuce, 3 boxes of Cheerios, 3lbs of oranges, and 3 Lean Cuisine meals.
• Grocery total: $212.79 before sales and coupons
• I paid $16.22 for the groceries and $3.94 for the coupons I got in bulk - total: $20.16!  That’s like 90% off!  YAY!

Things I learned: 

• Extreme Couponing takes time to learn!  Start small, do your research, and try not to get frustrated with yourself if you make a mistake – you are probably still saving money!
• Be polite to the store clerks!
• Try not to come up with a negative balance because it makes it hard on the cashier since they can’t give you cash back – throw in some extra groceries to bring your balance up.  I didn’t intend to, but due to a couponing error on my part, I came up -.08 and the manager had to come over to fix it… and I still had one more transaction to do-oops!
• If there is a good CAT deal, but you know you don’t need 200 cans of soup, consider giving it away to a family in need or a local food pantry.
• Be creative and have fun with it.  But don’t become obsessed or your husband might call you the ‘crazy soup lady’. (ahem.)

Have you had a positive Extreme Couponing experience?

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