Entry 597: Extreme Couponing (Huebner Style)

A few months ago Julie began watching the show Extreme Couponing and decided that she wanted to give it a try.  Extreme Couponing, for those who have never seen it, is a show where people cut coupons and save ridiculous amounts of money at the store (we're talking usually well over a hundred dollars).  Lance was not on board with Julie's idea at first, but he decided to go along with it to see if we could save any money doing this.

Let me explain how this works, Huebner style.  Every Sunday Lance gets up at 8:45 and goes to Dollar Tree to pick up two-three Sunday papers.  Why Dollar Tree, you ask.  Good question, Lance goes to Dollar Tree because each Sunday paper is only a dollar while everywhere else it is $2.25 (see already we're saving money).  Once home, Julie goes through the paper and takes out all the ads and coupons she wants to look at.  Then the process of cutting the coupons out and throwing away the expired coupons begins.  This is only the beginning because Lance has companies emailing him coupons all the time, so we then have to go through the emails and see what kind of deals they have for us.  The last step is to go through all of the ads and find where the good deals are and if we have any coupons for them.  This whole process takes between 2-3 hours each Sunday.

Afterwards we do our grocery shopping for the week and usually we save between $30-$40, but this weekend it seemed like everything we were looking for was on sale and we ended up saving close to $100.  This all sounds like a great deal, but there are some downfalls to it.  The biggest problem we ran in to was having so many things that we didn't have enough space for it all.  We ended up having to clean out the towel closet so we could use it to store all of the items.  Let's just say that we have enough toothpaste, deodorant, and dog treats for a couple of years.

This is a lot of work, but in the end with the money we save it is worth it.