Every once in a while, you may want to buy more coupon inserts when there will be a lot of coupons you'll use. So how do you know ahead of time how many newspapers you should buy? There are some blogs that post ahead of time what coupons to expect. I, however, use a great site called Sunday Coupon Preview. Usually by Thursday, they will post all of the coupons expected to be in each insert. You can also look at their list of the insert schedule (which coupon inserts will appear on which weeks).
If you begin to get into coupon trains, and other coupon trading, you may want to consider buying more papers. Be sure to take this expense into account when you're calculating your savings and creating a budget.
When I first started couponing seriously, I tended to over-buy newspapers and end up with a lot of coupons go to waste. Now, I usually buy between 4-6 newspapers depending on the quality of the coupons for that week.
One final thought: if you have several newspapers available in your area, investigate which paper has the best coupons. In my area, there is a local paper that only gets the Red Plum inserts and P&G on a monthly basis. It costs $2 for a Sunday paper. Then there is the Dallas Morning News. It always gets the Smartsource and Red Plum inserts, plus the P&G insert and the new Pepsico insert. It costs $3 for a Sunday paper. To me, it is worth the extra dollar to always get all of the inserts available each week.
Do you have thoughts about how to determine how many papers to buy? Post a comment below!
Hi! I've lived overseas my whole life and have never used coupons once! How much money would you say you save per week/month now that you are a serious coupon user?
ReplyDelete--New follower!!!
Ang, thanks for following. The key to saving is to buy when items are on sale, and use a coupon at the same time. To really save, you buy enough of that item to last you until the next time the item will go on sale for its cheapest price (sales go in 12 week cycles). Using this method, I save about $100 a week. Now, that doesn't mean I see "saved $100" at the bottom of my receipt, but by pre-buying what I need, I am spending about $50-$100 on groceries for a family of 4 where before I spent $150-$200 a week.
ReplyDelete