<p>I found that there are no coupons for cleanning items that I use. I buy them at Dollar store, they are cheaper and better there. But the specific ones that are not there never have coupons for them.</p>
<p>Just saw this in the news the other day: [10</a> Things To Never Buy At A Dollar Store - Saving Advice Articles](<a href=“You are being redirected...”>You are being redirected...)
Item #!:</p>
<p>“Laundry Detergent and Cleaning Supplies
Cleaning supplies are expensive, so you might think that buying them from a dollar store is saving you some money. However, laundry detergent and cleaning supplies from the dollar store aren’t made from quality chemicals. The supplies tend to be watered down and the chemicals used are often an off-brand, and they occasionally leave an unpleasant odor or stain after you use them”</p>
<p>A friend whose grandson works for a second hand store says they buy items like toothpaste, paper towels, TP and the like, from people at about 20-30 cents on the dollar and jack the price up 50-100% for resale. </p>
<p>I think many of these extreme couponers (sp) dont/cant admit it but actually resale the items.</p>
<p>I use Costco, Safeway and BBB coupons. I love getting the 20% off everything BBB coupon. I used one to buy my last Dyson vac. :)</p>
<p>Couponing helped out in a huge way for our family of six. As a single mom it made many things that were unaffordable, affordable.</p>
<p>As far as the “extreme couponing” the way to pay for roof is to sell the “extras” at a garage sale. If you pay $0 for an item or better yet gain overage on the purchase, whatever you sell it for later goes towards the “roof” or in our case, college textbooks.</p>
<p>Multiple coupons can be purchased from coupon sites and from ebay. With free shipping and paying $1.00 for like coupons, is what allows for “extreme couponing”. So $600 worth of free groceries, 1 trip can become product for a family and $300 in cash.</p>
<p>Again, using coupons is something we have done for over 30 years and all my kiddos realize the value of coupons, their time and their resources. </p>
<p>Now using Craig’s List to find wonderful and fantastic finds (furniture, dishes, vintage wear) and reselling at a garage sale, ebay or to a designer’s source also made it easier to fund the kiddos’ college and grad school careers!</p>
<p>Kat</p>
<p>Wow Kat, sounds like you have been very creative in getting the $$ to roll in! I would wonder about the time factor - finding the “fantastic finds”, listing them on ebay, shipping them - how much time do you find it takes to dedicate to this? Do you do this outside of a daytime job???</p>
<p>Since there are 6 of us plus their SOs, everyone has a job to do, easy to split the work up! Even when they were little they all had their roles to play. Craig’s List is often done in the evenings, setting appts., and mostly pick/ups on the weekends. Saw a great deal of the state this way, great living in the furniture capital of the US. Ebay, of course, is 24 hours a day…and that is not my forte…have a much more creative daughter who handles all that. Truly a family affair, even the med school son (previous offensive lineman) drives the truck and has been known to move a sofa on his own!</p>
<p>Kat
son furnished his new apt for med school on Craig’s List/ebay/garage sale finds. Looks amazing…$5 a gallon oops paint can do wonders, lovely linen lined drapes (pinch pleated) from Big Lots were a big hit and the thermal lining is saving big time on the utility costs and makes it seem more homey rather than an apt!</p>
<p>Extreme couponing is not efficient. What is the point of having 25 bottles of spaghetti sauce?!</p>
<p>I do wonder, as was said upthread, how much of the non perishable stuff might be resold at a profit (ebay, amazon , etc). There was an article in the paper recently about someone who made a lot of $$ doing this.</p>
<p>Another suggestion is simply consume less and re-use. Pop could be replaced by tab water, it is not free, but much much cheaper. Cereal could be replaced by more nutricious oatmeal or egg breakfast, again, not free, but much cheaper, even clothes could be shared or hand down from one family member to another, plastic bags could be re-used as garbage bags and paper bags are awesome packaging…there are many ways and certian items could be simply removed frim the diet, period, for being too expansive as there are no coupons for them anyway.<br>
I watched the show several times, I never saw carts being filled with fresh meat, chicken, fish, vegetables, fruits, eggs. It is mostly junk, but if they decide to buy it, why not? They would be saving much more working full time though, but again it is each family choice. They love couponning, I love some other meanningless to outsider activity, so be it. Having 25 bottles of spaghetti sause has the same meanning to somebody as painting a picture to another, it is self-fullfilling, saving on shrink’s fees.</p>
<p>My favorite pasttime is finding deals on the web. Definitely a healthy hobby. But this doesnt involve stockpiling excessive quantities of stuff that would turn someones basement into a pint sized Costco. Thats extreme.</p>
<p>I can’t get my head around the time commitment. (I will admit that Extreme Couponers is one of my many guilty pleasure TV shows…up there with Hoarders and Monster In-Laws.) Some of the people on the show say they spend 40-50 hours per week…which means if they weren’t couponing they could get a full-time job and pay for the groceries (assuming they aren’t a SAHM/D, or unable to work in some way)!</p>
<p>I also agree that the items never seem to be particularly healthy. You rarely see any type of fruit/vegetable/meat. Which means they’re probably shopping separately, since you can’t live on that food they’re buying; at least not without getting extremely sick.</p>
<p>I’ve also noticed that a lot of stores have cracked down on their coupon policies even more since this show started. I saw a woman at my local grocery store the other day arguing with the manager because she was trying to use about a million (barely exaggerating, the stack of coupons was in one of those huge binders they have on the show) coupons and the manager told her the policy wouldn’t allow it. The stores are losing too much money thanks to this show.</p>
<p>I do admire it when the people donate what they get to shelters, food pantries, etc. More power to you, and they always need the food. I just don’t get it when people buy things like 100 boxes of pasta and plan to keep it all. No it doesn’t “go bad” per se, but even pasta does technically expire after about a year or so.</p>
<p>It seems (the shows that I’ve seen) that usually the couponers are SAHM who maybe see the couponing as a sort of “work at home” job - so they are willing to take the time it takes (hours) for the “pay” - if indeed they do turn around and sell or whatever.</p>
<p>The stores around here (other than Costco & sometimes Walgreen’s or CVS) don’t have coupons and don’t double any coupons. Most of the stuff I see for coupons are products our family does not use, so I don’t bother any more. Did use the coupons for diapers some decades back.</p>
<p>Donating things you get in abundance sounds like a good plan, but it does seem like a lot of work. I have donated groceries when I stocked up at a good price. Don’t see the value in using our limited space to stockpile “stuff,” no matter how inexpensive. Even non-perishable things can attract bugs & take up megaspace.</p>
<p>Oh, and I could put 25 jars of spaghetti sauce to good use - that’s not hard, a pasta dish every 2 weeks for a year. But much of the other stuff astounds me - especially the sugary drinks which no one at my house has/would ever indulge in.</p>
<p>There’s couponing and there’s couponing. Looking in the paper for a daily special on meat, vegetables and fruit or quality products you actually use on a regular basis is one thing. Stocking up on crates of bottled water in hopes of saving money on them by the end of 2013 is, IMHO, really silly. Why buy bottled water if you’re trying to save money? And that savings? Please. Financially, you’re better off mowing the lawn for your neighbor once a week if you’re that desperate.</p>
<p>katliamom–yes. We look for things on sale that we frequently use, and stock up. For example, recently our store had boneless skinless chicken breasts on sale for $1.97 per pound (CHEAP!!!). We bought quite a few packages, portioned and froze them…now whenever we want chicken all we have to do is thaw. We do eat quite a bit of chicken, so it made sense. (And it will keep in the freezer for quite some time.) But I can’t imagine couponing things like they do on the show–100 bottles of Gatorade? No thank you.</p>
<p>We get the Sunday L.A. Times (comes with online subscription) and sometimes I’ll go through the stack of ads included to see if there’s anything I can pass on to my Dd, who is on a fairly tight budget.
Not a bad batch from last week or two: $3 off Neosporin, $1 off Tom’s toothpaste and $1 for floss, $1 off Tazo tea bags, $1.50 off Starbucks coffee, $1 off Starbucks Via and $1 off Starbucks Ice Cream, $2 off Nature Made Fish Oil, and $1 off Organic Valley butter, $2 off Aveeno products.</p>
<p>We used to save Green Stamps when I was a kid. I remember sitting at the table around age six pasting the stamps into the books with a sponge. They didn’t have coupons in those days. Anyone else remember Green Stamps?</p>
<p>I admit that few of the above products are actually “needs”, but they are things we buy. There are cheaper versions of all of the items, if one really needed to save money. Buying Organic Valley butter even with a buck off probably wouldn’t make sense to some when you can get Kroger store brand at half the price.</p>
<p>^^^^Yep, to Green Stamps. And going to the Green Stamp store to redeem. :)</p>
<p>Green stamps! That’s how we got our classy gold flecked TV tables!</p>
<p>The Green Stamp Redemption Center: in 1963, the stuff dreams were made of.</p>
<p>Oh, I understand using coupons for stuff you need and use - don’t have a problem with that. It is the “extreme” part that puzzles me.</p>
<p>Though after the “I’m saving $600 for my roof by stockpiling 10 years worth of artificial sweetener and sports drinks” lady, I did watch a couple of people that made more sense. One slightly looney lady actually was giving lessons to people about how to coupon, and they were people who needed a way to afford their groceries and were buying stuff they needed. Then there was the fraternity episode where a bunch of frat boys were buying goods for their toga party using coupons, that was actually pretty entertaining and I was impressed by their resourcefulness (though I could have lived without seeing the toga clad jello wrestling in the paddling pool!).</p>
<p>But then the last one was these two women who make it a goal to end up paying $0 - they got $2,000+ worth of “stuff” for $0, but ine of them had converted a huge room in her house into storage for all the “stuff”. She could have opened her own supermarket.</p>
<p>Imagine if any of these people get a bug problem.</p>