Our First Extreme Couponing Adventure

I'm sorry, but have you seen this show?!? Ok, so we got sucked in because one of our cousins is featured on it...but when we saw it, we were hooked. We aren't quite sure why we watch things on reality tv and then always decide that these ridiculous shows are awesome and we must participate in whatever activity is being thrown at our faces that very moment. As is the case with Extreme Couponing.

The first week's episode featured a quite fashionable and young mom participating in the above activity with her son and best friend. Now, you may not know much about couponing, but when you find out what it is you basically feel idiotic that you have spent your whole life paying for items in stores. These people get everything for free, or even get paid to take things out of stores...it doesn't sound possible, but it is. So we are obviously young and have so many things we could be spending our hard earned cash on besides groceries and toiletries and toilet paper (hey now, you know that charmin is expensive!) So what did we decide to do? Yep, try the couponing thing out for ourselves. We're too young to get the Sunday paper, so we settled on four dives into newspaper recycling bins by our house and printing coupons offline. (We didnt actually get in the dumpster, we just pulled out the top 50 newspapers or so) We clipped the coupons, waited for this weeks circulars to appear online, and made a plan.

We decided to hit up Publix, because it had the best weekly deal offerings. Now the way that it works best is actually to use stores like Publix. Publix offers about 20 items Buy One, Get One (BOGO) every week. They also accept coupons from any competitor store and they will double your coupons (swipe each one twice) if they are $.50 or under. So for example, if Crest Toothpaste was $2.00 and BOGO, Target released a Crest $.50 off one tube coupon, and in Sunday's paper there was also a $.50 off one tube coupon you would get 2 tubes of Crest toothpaste for free...2 tubes of toothpaste $2.00 (BOGO) minus Target's coupon swiped twice (-$1.00) minus Sunday's paper coupon swiped twice (-$1.00) = $2.00 - 1.00 - $1.00 = FREE!!!!

Extreme Couponing shows you people going into stores, racking up $1600 grocery bills, and walking out paying about $7.00 total...we aren't exaggerating. One of our cousins does it all the time. So naturally, we had to try this. We wanted to do it on a small scale, so we devised a plan and set out. Now right before we left for the store, we had a malfunction with our computer and couldn't print out our coupons...so we ended up only being able to use the ones we already had. We'll show you what we got, how much it cost, and how much it would have cost if we had gotten our coupons from online.

Here's our treasure pile...minus one bag of Dove chocolates because SOMEONE couldn't wait until we got home to start eating them ::cough, cough::

- 6 boxes of Special K cereal: regularly $3.95 each, we paid: $1.30 each
- 2 cans Pam cooking spray: regularly $3.19 each, we paid: $.89 each
- 1 Airwick double pack refill oils: regularly $5.50, we paid: $2.99
- 2 boxes of Triscuits: regularly $2.99 each, we paid: $1.50 each
- 2 bags Dove chocolates: regularly $4.24 each, we paid: $1.62 each
- 2 Tropicana orange juices: regularly $4.00 each, we paid: $2.00 each
- 2 50 count Mentos gum: regularly $3.29 each, we paid: $1.14 each
- 10 Chobani yogurts: regularly $1.33 each, we paid: $1.00 each
- 2 bags Alexia buttermilk biscuits: regularly $3.39 each, we paid: $1.42 each
- 2 boxes Duncan Hines cake mix: regularly $1.83, we paid: $.64 each
- 2 boxes Quaker chewy granola bars: regularly $2.99, we paid: $.75 each
- 2 boxes NutriGrain bars: regularly $3.49 each, we paid: $1.25 each
- 2 Dial hand soaps: regularly $1.59 each, we paid: $.30 each
- 9 Bird's Eye frozen vegetables: regularly between $1.79-$2.39 each, we paid: $.21 each

Grand total before coupons and discounts: $125.33 ($62.67 each)
What we paid: $51.29 ($25.65 each)

Now, three things did not get the coupon usage of our online coupons. Those were:
- Chobani: an additional $.60 off each yogurt (-$6.00)
- Triscuit: an additional $1.00 off each box (-$2.00)
- Alexia biscuits: an additional $1.00 off each bag (-$2.00)

That would have made the Chobani $.40 each, the Triscuits $.50 each and the Alexia biscuits $.42 each...and our grand total only $41.29 ($20.65 each).

We don't know about you guys, but usually we are the ones paying the full $125 grocery bills. On this trip alone we had the opportunity to save about 68% (had our printer worked). Why wouldn't you want extra money??? We sure as heck do!