Extreme Coupons, Yowza!

When I was working full time at a Fortune 500 company, I was admittedly stupid with money, and it shows; it shows that I saved less than 10% of my wages over a period of 12 years and that, well that is not good. It will be enough to supplement my loans and part time work during school but a man has to take nerdy chicks out on dates as well.    

So we plan, AKA we use Google to find ways to save money.  

Extreme Couponing, if you are not familiar with this concept watch the show.  It is on TLC, the same network that has Honey Boo Boo and Hoarders.  Extreme couponing is an amalgamation of both.  

Check out some of the full episodes of Extreme Couponing if you are inclined.  I watch random crap on my 2nd monitor and some of these people's hulls are impressive.  I mean who doesn't want 200 cans of Chili, 100 bags of croutons, or enough plastic containers of baby wipes to build your own castle?  You guys like castles right?  

Anyway the gist of Extreme Couponing is this.  

Find a good overview on Extreme Couponing by one of the many fanatics ( the more popular sites change often so Google to keep current and abreast of the best communities). 

Resolve to at least use coupons, especially if you have never used them before.  

Find a community that is relatively sane.  Many extreme couponing forums seem little more than open asylums for future contestants of hoarders or a new show on TLC about disaster preparation from Obamacare, Lizard People or Jews.  

I have found this forum to be relatively free of the Grade A crazy -- you will get a bit of Christian supermom anecdotes and affirmations:

A Full Cup Forums

So I've only been doing this for two weeks and at Winco I've saved 30 dollars total on my last 110 dollars in groceries.  

Biggest thing I learned so far.  If you find a coupon you use, find a way to get multiple ones of them.  Lots of them can be printed out online and the best ones I've found is by going to companies' pages, Twitter Accounts, and Facebook pages.  I used a two dollar off Boca Burgers coupons 6x before it expired.  That is twelve bucks I did not have to spend for something that I eat almost daily.  

This is a good active Facebook group to get started but there are many more out there called Hunt4freebies.

Try using a single coupon if you never have, it is really, really not that hard.  Printing out coupons and grabbing a Sunday paper once a week costs me maybe a half hour tops and that saved me 30 bucks over two weeks.  Good luck, post in comments if you find any other good sites out there.