Comments on: Review: Savvy Saving

By: gail

gail — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:46:35 +0000

Use coupons for HABA items, paper towels, toilet paper, laundry detergent, etc. With careful planning, you can stockpile these items for free or almost free using coupons and sales.
And if you can get an item for free and you don’t care for the product, why not donate it to a food bank or women’s shelter?

By: deRuiter

deRuiter — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:01:45 +0000

That extreme couponing TV program makes me queasy. What are they going to do with 132 bottles of salad dressing? (it will eventually expire.) 117 toothbrushes? Hoarding is one sign of Schizophrenia and the lead in each of these disturbing programs appears to suffer from that symptom. I like having a little backup so there’s no need for a last minute mad dash to the grocery store, and enough in case power is off for a week or two, I stock up at sales like Shop Rite’s famous “can-can” sale, but hoarding and obsessing over coupons for mostly over processed foods with long lists of ingredients, many of them dubious, isn’t my interest. Some brands just are better than certain generics, in a lot of cases it doesn’t matter and is a lot cheaper. If you like fresh, or not heavily / chimcally processed foods, you can’t dso a lot of couponing. The whole purpose of coupsons is to sell you overprocessed food which contains not much of the main ingredients but lots of fillers and junk.

By: M E 2

M E 2 — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:29:47 +0000

Monthly menu planning doesn’t mean buy food for a months worth of meals. It means plan your meals out for a month based on what you already have and/or plan to buy. @@

By: sarah

sarah — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:12:13 +0000

Does anyone else find it ironic that Trent’s main problem with this book and couponing is regarding brand/product loyalty – only a few days after an article about how being brand loyal is a major problem that we should all overcome?

I’ve found with couponing that there are some items we are strongly brand loyal (some of those being store-brands) to, others where a few brands work, and some where anything will do. For products are are loyal to a particular product, I watch for the best sale on those. For ones that don’t matter, I buy whatever is free/near free.

By: MP3

MP3 — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 22:22:15 +0000

I don’t do much couponing because most food coupons are on processed foods that I rarely buy. I do find butter and egg coupons periodically and use them when the brand goes on sale but I don’t have massive savings on my groceries.

I think if you plan your shopping trip by reading the flyers, be willing to make 3 or 4 stops for the sales of the items you need, you can pretty much figure out how much you have to stockpile until the store offers the item on sale again.

Generally, for things like spaghetti sauce, there’s always a sale on and since most canned sauces taste the same, and we enhance the sauces ourselves with spices and meat, then I never stockpile that.

I will stockpile frozen fruit chunks in the winter so I can continue to make smoothies and I notice the brand I like generally goes on sale at our local grocery store once every five weeks. So I stock up at the lower price with enough to get through the next 5 weeks.

By: valleycat1

valleycat1 — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 15:26:33 +0000

I’m not too much into couponing. However, the dining out on a budget strategy is something we do – a few of the really good restaurants here have great happy hours with wonderful & healthy (!) appetizer options for half price. For $10 apiece we can have a light dinner with a beer or two. It’s also often a lot less expensive to eat lunch out at a nice restaurant rather than dinner.