I’ve traveled down the extreme couponing road before and I’ve vowed to never do it again. It wouldn’t hurt a thing because it will make your life easier and it will ultimately save you money, but only if you do it the right way. You know, those things like toothpaste, toilet tissue, dish detergent – you buy those things, right? And what would it hurt to save a dollar or two on those things? Even better, what would it hurt to build a stockpile of those things you use regularly? One of the main ways to ease into frugal living is to be more diligent about saving money on things you already buy. You may have to pull items out and check expiration dates etc.If you’ve been wondering how to start couponing for beginners, you’re in the right place. This does sometimes mean a little time and work when re-stocking the stockpile. Like items all go together and they go in order of expiration date. Our second system for managing our coupon stockpile is to store everything in an organized manner. Or, if we have plenty of an item, we know we don’t need to purchase anymore or it may go unused – which ultimately is like wasting money instead of saving it! This way we know when we are starting to get low on an item, we can start shopping for sales on that item to get stocked back up. It includes how many of each item, how long it takes us to use them and then auto-calculates how long we have stocked up for. And if you are making a stockpile you should think about using these (or making your own).įirst, we have a master spreadsheet that shows everything in our stockpile. So, once you have 20 tubes of toothpaste in your closet, you want to make sure they don’t go to waste! We have a few systems in place to help us manage our coupon stockpile. (If you don’t have control over your budget yet, check out these budget tracking spreadsheets for all the help you need to set a stable, manageable budget!) Managing Your Coupon Stockpile ![]() Don’t go over your budget and get into a financial hole just to stock-up. ![]() If you know you will fly through an item and/or it has either no expiration date or one that is very far out, the best way to decide how much of the item to stock-up on is by seeing how much room you have in your monthly budget. That way we never end up with anything being forgotten. We arrange our stockpile left to right, front to back, oldest to newest. If you buy more than you will use before the item expires, you ultimately end up wasting money – this is NOT what we want to do! ![]() This way you can compare the items expiration date to how long it will take you to go through it and then figure out how many you should purchase for your stockpile.įor example, if you go through one tube of toothpaste every 3 months then you only want to buy enough toothpaste to last until the expiration date on the tubes. In order to know how much of each item you should buy, you need to know how quickly you use that item. This allows you to not bust your budget and also stay organized and not get overwhelmed with looking for too many deals all at once. Once you have your list of what you want and need to stockpile, you should then focus on getting one or two items at a time. We like to freeze most things to preserve them and have worked on freezing peppers, freezing spaghetti squash, freezing sweet potatoes and much more! Grow enough for a whole year and then you won’t have to buy that item at the store! Growing your own food is most times much cheaper than buying it in the store. ![]() So, while we are calling this a coupon stockpile, if you garden you can also stockpile food for super cheap.
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