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Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Extreme Couponing - California Style

I am hooked on that Extreme Couponing show.  I am amazed by what those shoppers can achieve at the checkout line.  I am jealous of their 96% savings.  I am flabbergasted by their $25,000 stockpiles.  I am in awe of the time spent on couponing.  You get the idea....

But I can't do what they do where I live.  There is no longer a grocery store that double coupons, since Ralphs closed about 5  years ago.  And we aren't allowed to do coupon stacking, the process by which a shopper can use multiple manufacturer coupons on one item to bring the price down, sometimes all the way to zero.  So how extreme can I actually get?

Well... I can save almost half every time I go to the store.  For me, for this area, I think that's pretty darn good.  But it takes work, every week to keep it up.  I go to 6 different stores almost every week, and the trick to being successful is knowing the "regular" price of the items we use all the time.  There will never be a $25,000 stockpile in my garage, but I do stock up on what we use.

There are tricks to maximizing savings.  Each Sunday, I clip coupons for items we use and things we might want to try.  Then I go through the ads for the stores where I know I can get the best deals: CVS, Walgreen's, and Target (grocery store ads show up on Tuesday or Wednesday).  I look for, again, only the things we use.  I always try to match up sales with coupons.  I also look for rewards that the stores give, so I can save money on the next trip.  I had $5 in reward coupons from Walgreen's - Christian and I got our movie candy free!  I do the same at Vons and Savemart - at those stores, I ONLY shop for sale items that I have coupons for; otherwise, they are just too expensive.  And my final stop is Winco for everything else. 

Winco rocks!  Let me just put it to you this way: I save almost $3 a box on my Kashi cereal (and I buy 3 boxes at a time), almost $4 a bag on Christian's spicy chicken wings, and over $1 a gallon for milk.  Just on those items alone, I save $20 by shopping at Winco every pay period.  And that's just a small example of what I save there.

My mom taught me how to coupon when I was a kid.  I've done it off and on for years, but this year we got serious, and I am getting a lot more out of our grocery budget.  While I may not be able to save 96%, I am still proud of what I am able to do.  Want to learn more about my methods?  Message me on Facebook! 

Sunday, May 1, 2011

Adventures in Gardening

I am not a gardener.  I am got good at keeping plants alive, so I never kept any.  But since we moved into our house, I have found that some plants can pretty much keep themselves alive.  The poppies that come up every March, for example, are extremely hardy and need absolutely no interference on my part to do their thing (you know, make my front yard gorgeous for a few months each year).  The roses in our back yard, as well, have fared without me doing much of anything, other than annual pruning.



But this year, our rose bushes have not done so well.  They grow well and are producing large, beautiful roses, but they appear to have some sort of fungus and they are full of aphids.  We don't like to use pesticides on our plants, so off HC went to OSH to buy some ladybugs.  Tonight, after hosing down the rose bushes and waiting for them to be out of the sun, we released our new little friends.

We all had fun, trying to shake them out onto the plants while many of them flew away and many crawled over our hands and arms.  Finally, we got a large number of them onto the bushes, happily wandering, drinking water, and searching for food.  According to the container, in a couple weeks, our bugs will lay eggs.  I hope in the next couple months, we have lots of larvae and many more ladybugs.

For not being a gardener, I sure am enjoying have living plants in my yard!  I have no idea what to do about the fungus on my poor rose bushes, but once our little friends eat those pesky aphids, we'll move on to that.

One of these days, I will post photos about our wildflower garden (which takes no work, either)! 

Happy May Day!