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simple steps

How To Save Money With Coupons With These 4 Simple Steps

By //  by guest

[This is a guest post from Tim at Faith and Finance, about how to save money with coupons.  He and his wife are coupon ninjas and recently wrote an eBook called How To Coupon.]

“That’ll be $9.47,” the cashier said as he totaled all our items.  It’s always hard to hold back my excitement when I hear a cashier tell say that our total is less than ten bucks, especially when we have three full bags of items worth over $80!  Sometimes we’ll literally hear people behind us whisper in disbelief at how low the total is.  We try not to make a big deal of it, so when people ask, “how did you do that,” we smile and say, “we just used the right coupons.”

Ok, that’s not entirely true (well, the saving part is, but there’s a little more to the method).  You can’t just walk into a store and expect to save 80% on everyday items like deodorant, razors, and toothpaste because you’re holding a crisp coupon in your hand.  While couponing isn’t rocket science, it does take some planning and a little knowhow.

Trust me, when we first started, we had no clue how to coupon.  In fact, I made up all sorts of excuses about coupons and why it wasn’t worth our time.  Man was I wrong!

You’ve probably seen a few examples of Khaleef and Sherrian’s shopping trips on this blog.  They understand how to ‘stack’ coupons and use store rewards for their benefit, which is how they can get items at a steep discount, and sometimes even free!

How To Save Money With Coupons

If you’ve been telling yourself, “man, I should start couponing” there’s no better time than now.  It may seem like there’s a lot to learn, but don’t feel overwhelmed about it.  We’re going to outline the basics here, but if you want an even more thorough explanation of how our family (and Khaleef’s) saves thousands a year with coupons, take a look at our thorough eBook How to Coupon.

1.     Get Organized

This may seem like a no brainer, but it’s the key to saving the most money through couponing.  Create a coupon binder and use baseball card sleeves to organize your coupons by categories like frozen foods, drinks, shampoo, etc.  (The eBook has free dividers for you to print out).

As you find deals online, you can quickly reference your binder to see if you have any applicable coupons.  If not, you can ignore the deal and move on to the next one.

2.     Set Aside Time

The most time consuming part of couponing is cutting and sorting them.  We spend about 2-3 hours a week if we have a bunch of newspapers to pull coupons from.

The bright side is that once you have your coupons organized and your shopping list made up based on your coupons, you can easily get through the aisles of your favorite store very quickly.

3.     Follow the Deals Online

There are a few tricks to finding the best deals.  Coupon blogs will actually highlight the best deals for the coming weeks.  Subscribe to blogs like The Krazy Coupon Lady, I Heart Wags, and I Heart CVS to get a preview of the store deals as well as tips on how you can use your coupons to maximize your purchase.

[Khaleef’s note: Another way to save money with coupons is by using our free coupon database]

4.     Stock Up

A lot of people will quickly use the excuse: “I don’t need 12 bottles of ketchup, so couponing doesn’t make any sense to me.”  I agree.  Unless you’re opening a restaurant, there’s no good reason why you need to rush to the store to buy that much ketchup!

It does make sense, however, to stock up on nonperishable items that you go through often.  For example, when we find a deal on toothpaste that makes the total cost around $0.25, you bet we’ll stock up on 4-6 tubes.  We usually try to get enough to last about three months because that’s generally the sales cycle you’ll find for most deals.

Hopefully you’ve gathered a few helpful tips and found some inspiration to start your journey to save hundreds, if not thousands of dollars each year with coupons.

Do you try to use coupons when you go to the store?  If not, what are your reservations about using coupons?  Do you think it’s a waste of time?

photo by dmdonahoo

Filed Under: Coupons, shopping Tagged With: bills, business, community websites, coupon, coupon lady, coupon organizing, couponing, Coupons, groceries, grocery, how to save money, How To Save Money With Coupons, lower, lows, marketing, money, sales promotion, simple steps, stacks coupon, steps

Build Up Your Financial Security In Uncertain Times

By //  by guest

[This post is written by Derek from Creating A Passive Income. His goal is to explore every single passive income source there is and evaluate their effectiveness and revenue. If you’re interested in extra income, be sure to check out his site.]

There is a common piece of advice going around between parents and students. “Go to school, find a safe, secure job with good benefits, and you’ll retire well.” Let me be the first to tell you, this advice is terrible.

In our world today, there are fewer jobs than there are people, and employee turnover is higher than ever before. If you make a mistake or if your salary exceeds what is typical for your position, you might very well be on the chopping block. You might have your college degree, but guess what, so does everyone else.

The Typical Response for Financial Security

Occasionally, things just don’t work out with employment. It might not even have been your fault. The decline of the economy, the struggling sales of your company, or a transfer of ownership could be the cause of your job displacement. Whatever the case may be, you should have a financial plan in place so that you’re protected against total bankruptcy.

Once again, there’s some common advice out there – “To protect yourself from financial devastation after a job loss, you must have an emergency fund with funds equivalent to 6 months worth of expenses.” While I do condone an emergency fund, this alone will not protect you against complete financial failure.

After all, what if you just can’t find a job until month number 8? What happens then? You load up the credit cards? I hope not. The problem with setting aside a static stash of cash is that it is not regenerative. If you keep pulling money out and no more money gets put in, it WILL run out!

Financial Security 2

photo credit: Stuart Miles

The Best From of Financial Security

In these economic times, one really has no sense of security in a typical job. I’ve seen it too many times – people proclaim that no one can do what they do and that they’re too valuable to get rid of. And then….they get the boot….

Rather than depend only on an emergency fund for that potential job loss, I suggest that you focus on two more aspects of financial security.

1)      Live well below your means

2)      Build a residual cash flow

Live Well Below Your Means

My wife and I both work and we make a point to live off only one of our incomes. That way, if one of us loses a job (it’s happened before), we’re still completely fine financially. Maybe you can’t bring your expenses down to half of what you’re used to, but make an effort to reduce them and you’ll feel much more secure in the event that a job is lost.

Build a Residual Cash Flow

Instead of having just one or two incomes, why not go for three or four? That way, if one of your jobs says “see-ya”, it won’t be that big of a deal. My wife and I both have full-time jobs, plus she does photography on the side and I earn quite a bit of money through various passive income ventures. Now this is a true set-up for financial security, wouldn’t you say?

Perhaps you’re strapped for time and cannot possibly start another venture. If this is the case, then at least have some potential income options written down. You don’t want to lose your job and have no possible income sources. This is how you deplete your emergency savings in record time and make friends with the repo men…

Have you set up an emergency fund in the event of a job loss? Have you done anything more?

article photo by cooldesign

Filed Under: Personal Finance Tagged With: credit card, Credit Cards, economic history of the united states, Economics, extra income, finance, financial, financial independence, financial planning, Financial Security, human interest, income, labor, late 2000s recession, passive income, protect, simple steps, subprime mortgage crisis, terrible

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