Centsable Saving Stories (and Struggles)

Welcome to Centsable Savings Stories and Struggles!

I am again in need of frugal shoppers to share their stories. If you’ve ever thought about sharing your story, please email me at centsable.katherine[at]gmail.com. More details are at the end of this post.

This week we are featuring Sharon, a BeCentsAble contributor for Aldi’s and the woman behind Good, True & Beautiful where she blogs about living abundantly on a budget! After 15 years of a successful corporate life, she is now applying her business skills to the best job of all – mom. She lives on a small farm in Upstate NY with her husband and infant son.

Sharon has a great sense of humor, and I know you will enjoy reading her story. The first paragraph made both my husband and I laugh out loud. Hilarious! Thank you for sharing your story, Sharon!

I have to admit, that for the first 35 years of my life I thought coupons were for crazy old ladies who had lots of cats and so much clutter you couldn’t see the kitchen table. I would see the segments on Oprah where women would buy a shopping-cart full of food for only $20 and I would think to myself, “I don’t know, that’s just a little weird.” So, it is with great surprise, and a bit of shock, that I acknowledge I have become a coupon-crazy lady (full disclosure: I do have two cats. Hmmm, correlation?).

My journey into the coupon-craze started in 2005. At the time, my husband and I were the classic DINKs (dual income, no kids) and not really paying attention to our spending. We were trying to start our family and, since I planned to stay home with a baby, the implications would be significant on our take-home pay.

We thought we were doing well–paying our bills each month and putting some aside for savings, but we weren’t living on a budget. Imagine my shock when, after doing a little basic analysis, I realized that we were spending over $700 a month on food! (Oh, that hurts just to write it down. $700 a month?!? How is that possible for only two people?). I confess that I never looked at prices in the grocery store, never paid attention to fliers and it was not unusual to eat out several times a week. We were a marketing department’s dream. Poof, there goes $700!

Fast forward to 2007 and the impending birth of our son. In the two intervening years, I had found significant ways to save money on lots of things, but I was still struggling to get our food budget in line. Then I stumbled onto the blogosphere where I learned that there was an ART to coupon shopping. There’s not only an art but a strategy, which certainly appealed to my business brain. I was using coupons a bit, but the idea to strategically combine a coupon with a promotion never even occurred to me (so much for that Ivy League education!).

Armed with some basic principles and an eagerness to save money, I jumped in and haven’t looked back since. The results? I have shaved our family’s food budget down to $275 a month and I am saving over 42% on those purchases. YEAH FOR COUPONS! I’m still a little bit amazed on how much I can save on the grocery bills just by paying attention, keeping track of prices and playing the “drugstore games.” (How neat is it that I can have a CVS receipt that says at the bottom “you’ve saved $876 this winter?” I love that!)

My current goal is to save more than I spend on each shopping trip. Do I succeed every time? No, but I’m having fun trying! And if I can do it, you can too! I share a lot of my strategies at www.GoodTrueandBeautiful.com, including the worksheets I use to track my savings and plan my CVS trips. You are welcome to stop by and check it out – after all, I think those crazy-old-cat-clutter ladies were on to something.