Are Coupons Worth the Hassle?

AND??
If companies would drop 20% off the prices MORE product would be sold.
with coupons, you must FIND them to use them.

In finance its a way to set money aside and make Interest off it, TAX free. for the company. or did you know that?

I don't use coupons because

1. I don't buy newspapers or magazines and I don't have a printer.

2. I save more by buying store brands. I never see coupons for the basic things I want to buy anyway.

I don't use coupons, but perhaps I'll start. Here is a video of a Mom feeding her family on 4$ a week:
http://wimp.com/momfamily/

I subscribe to a few blogs that do almost all the coupon work for me. They list the coupon matchups for the stores I frequent and include which newspaper the coupon was in or the link online to print it. Most coupons online can be printed twice meaning that if there are Buy One Get One Free sales, you can use 2 coupons for that deal. I get so much stuff for nearly free, it's pretty incredible and I barely do any research or coupon clipping at all.
The key is to stock up when things are on sale. Just this week I paid $15.63 and saved $45.10.

I got 6 lbs of Italian sausage, 6 pkgs of kraft shredded cheese, a steak and bell peppers using just coupons! All the sausage was free B1G1 sale with 3 printable B1G1 coupons. The cheese was B1G1 $3.69, I got 6 and found 2 coupons on a tear pad right in the store for $2 off 3 Kraft cheese. So 3x 3.69= 11.07, minus $4 in coupons = 7.07 for 6 pkgs of 7oz kraft 2% fat cheese. That's just $1.18 per pkg. Cheese freezes fine, by the way.

My most valuable resource is finding a blogger who lays all the deal out for me. There is no way I would have time to do all the research myself.

Also, check out HotCouponWorld dot com for more info, couponing support and chat forums.

Coupons sure would be great if they worked on all items in the store.. at every store. I wonder why stores haven't thought of that, yet? I mean, they *do* want us to save money, right? ;)

Some coupons are really useful. However, typically it appears coupons only narrow the gap between the prices of name brand and store brand products.

Most grocery stores have their weekly sale ads online and you can do a quick comparison before you go shopping to see if specific stores have items you want on sale. I've found that 5-10 minutes of research before I go out pays off the best for me.

HUGE HUGE hassle factor to find the exact item on the coupon, and yes you are forced to buy tons of stuff you don't need. Stocking up is fine if you have a large family but 1 and 2 person households don't need the abundance of large containers. So factor in the overpriced items being couponed and the irrational buying behavior and you really could do better simply buying from bulk containers or growing a garden rather than playing bingo with coupons. Don't play their game!

Coupons are generally for highly processed foods like canned soup, frozen meals, etc.... the types of foods which are connected with a specific brand. The food companies offer coupons to encourage people to buy their item for the first time in the hopes of creating a repeat buyer. If you want to eat healthy, you should spend most of your food budget on fresh vegetables, meats, grains, and dairy products... which are unlikely to have coupons. Sure, coupons will save you money, but at what cost to your health.

I just got to redflagdeals.ca, has a whole database of submited coupons. I do use that section much though, mostly just use the forums since I've been looking to get an LED TV and been waiting for the prices to come down.

I am an avid couponer, and it saves a ton of money. I buy the sunday paper for $2 every week and the rest of my coupons I get online. You have to shop smart and if possible use the coupons when the item is already on sale, and preferrably at stores that will double them, to really see the savings add up. Plus if you are smart about CVS/drugstore promotions you can combine with those to get some items for free. BUT it should go without saying (although some people still mess this up) that you're only saving money if you use a coupon for an item you can actually use!

You can get name brand cheaper than store brand by combining sales with coupons. AT websites like Pinchingyourpennies.com, volunteers match up the best combos. Last trip I got $60 worth of stuff for $24. And we LIKE using Mach3 razors instead of the cheapies.

@Elle: It's true that many of the coupons in the Sunday fliers are for processed foods, but not all coupons are for food and not all food coupons are for overly processed food. For instance there are plenty of coupons for pasta, eggs, frozen vegetables, etc, not to mention all kinds of toiletry items and services like restaurants and car washes. So you can still take advantage of coupons without compromising the types of items you buy.

I sometimes check out restaurant.com for 60%-off gift certificates to restaurants. And just yesterday I found www.entertainment-savings-offers.com, which offered an additional 80%-off gift code for certain restaurants on restaurant.com.

Short version: I got a $25 voucher (to a restaurant I was already planning to eat at) for two dollars.

The maths for the hourly rate assumes that you have a steady flow of input. Hunting around for the coupons could well take longer.

For all that, if it's a freebie, take it, provided it doesn't sell you something you weren't going to buy anyway.

All year round, I save 40-80% off my family's grocery bill using coupons and store specials -- that translates to "real money."

I also grow a large organic kitchen garden, which we eat from immediately in the spring, summer, and fall. The veg and herbs that I put up we eat in the winter, and augment with sale/coupon items from the grocery store. After the intial investment for tools and fencing, the garden costs about $100 for the three seasons.

However, the smile on my son's face as he picks a tomato and eats it in the summer sun is priceless. :-)

I use restaurant coupons all the time. They are convenient and usually some great deals.

I occasionally use coupons on grocery and beauty type stuff if I come across them while I'm browsing the paper or the mail. I don't seek them out. They're a bit tougher to use (to remember to bring them to the store, to calculate if they are going to make the product cheaper than the store brand, etc). My household is just my husband and me, so it would take a long time for the savings to add up to a significant amount of savings on our budget with little grocery coupons. If you have a big family, it could be really add up and be worth it, but for us, it's not really worth working very hard on.

I've found that for us the most efficient way to save the most money on trips to the grocery store is instead of spending time clipping coupons and finding sales, spending that time making a really well thought out shopping list. Doing an inventory of the kitchen before we make the list and seeing exactly what we have, then planing meals around that stuff. We bring both the shopping list and the kitchen inventory with us to the store. We shop primarily from the list, but use the inventory,too, so that if we get inspired while we're there or have to rethink a meal, we know for sure what we have at home. It reduces wasted food, re-buying things you already have, and impulse buys.

I'm with OddNumber, Elle and Leah. We make almost everything from scratch so processed, premade foods aren't on our menu often. In the summer we garden and eat our own fresh, organic produce.

Where we save grocery money is I check weekly fliers for the stores near us. Every store, even our locally-owned grocery stores (granted they have multiple stores in town so they're not "small"), has their flier available online. Albertson's even has their weekly sale items available via RSS feed.

I check for sale prices more than coupons since staples, fresh produce, meat and dairy tend to be on sale more than they'll have a coupon. Using Firefox and the Morning Coffee add-on, it's a no brainer to have most markets' fliers set for Wednesday and Fred Meyer's set for Sunday, which is when they put out the new fliers. Neatorama is set for everyday in Morning Coffee ;)

Also, we mainly shop Fred Meyer which has a rewards program so we get a small percentage back quarterly, in the form of gift certificates. From spending ~ $50-100 weekly, we'll get back $10-20 each quarter for shopping at the store we'd normally shop anyway. Free money and I don't care if they track my purchase history. It's pretty boring stuff anyway.

Like Melissa says, make a shopping list, stick to it, and don't shop when you're hungry.

For saving $$ on meat, we have a locally-owned butcher shop that offers mixed cuts and mixed meat (beef, chicken, pork) packages that are pretty cheap per pound and locally-sourced which makes me happy.

Finally, Costco has the best prices on certain staples. Just do the math and see if the annual membership fee is worth it for your family. If you buy enough at Costco, the executive membership may be worth it because of the rebate. Our annual membership is essentially free after rebate.

My local grocery store has it's own discount card. 12pcs of fresh fried chicken for $6.99 on Mondays. 10 frozen pizzas for $5.00. Got to love it.

I do cut and use coupons. I save more buying store brands and sale items, but when I need to use coupons, I do. And I usually save an avery of $8 to $12 per grocery bill. Worth it, to me.

I hate it when the person in line in front of me brings a lot of coupons... the scanner person scans each one in, and then about 25% of them don't work, so they have to key in the value manually. It's even worse than the people who insist on paying in exact change, and laboriously count out each penny.

So, I feel too guilty to use coupons myself, because I imagine the people in line behind me to be looking at me like I look at coupon users.

Also, food is pretty cheap anyway. Groceries aren't a big part of my budget, so it's also not worth the effort it was when I was younger.

Coupons are SO worth the hassle. You don't even have to buy processed foods to take advantage of them. Drugstores have great sales on health and beauty items all the time, and when combined with coupons, you can get very cheap and/or free items all the time. I do it EVERY WEEK. The problem with most peoples' thinking is that you can only use the coupons from the current week's inserts. I use a service that does 80% of the legwork for me, by matching sales with coupons that have been issued but not yet expired. So what if I pay $5-10 a week on the Sunday paper. I saved $40 on products from coupons in the 2/7 paper this week alone. That doesn't include all of the past papers coupons, store discounts, store rebates, etc.. I got so much stuff that I paid less than $1 or gotten free its ridiculous.

I cut coupons every week. Here's the deal:

LA Times Sunday Only subscription: $0.50/week
Amount of time it takes to cut coupons; 15 minutes
Average amount saved per week: $20

Pretty simple, really.

But I belong to the club for my grocery store and get the savings automagically.

I would rather save then not.. :)

Coupons are for cheapskates that put price above product quality and customer service. Groupon is the the worst of them all. A $100 Groupon sells for $40. Groupon takes $15 and the business takes $35 thus losing money on the deal after overhead.

How would you coupon cutter's feel if instead of getting your $1000 paycheck, you got $700 and a 30% off coupon?

See you at Walmart stingies!