I like reading all of your suggestions about making a grocery list and searching for bargains. My technique is actually pretty simple. I trust Consumer Reports completely – they’ve never led me wrong. So each month when I get an issue, I write down their “best buys” in each product category. That’s what I buy – I just look for the best deal among these. I often use coupons for things on that list, too.

I actually really like this idea – it provides a wonderful balance of getting quality items for a good price. In fact, I decided to give it a try myself with a few product categories just to see the results with my own eyes, so I pulled out the May 2009 issue of Consumer Reports and went shopping with five product categories in mind.

Kids’ Breakfast Cereal
Consumer Reports identified four best buys for cereals for children, balancing health, tastiness, and price: Cheerios, Life, Kix, and Honey Nut Cheerios.

I pulled out the grocery flyers this past weekend and found a sale at Target on the General Mills cereals (Cheerios and Life). I then flipped through the coupons and quickly found a coupon for those cereals.

End result: the price for a “double box” of Cheerios or of Life, after the coupon, was cheaper than almost any other cereal in the aisle, with only some generics beating them. After doing an ingredient and Nutrition Facts comparison, Life was our product of choice. The kids utterly love it and it’s pretty good for them, too.

Glass Cleaners
Consumer Reports identified five best buys for window cleaners: Windex No Drip Foaming Action, Sprayway Ammonia Free, Windex Crystal Rain Ammonia Free, Glass Plus, and Streak Free with Ammonia (the Wal-Mart store brand).

The solution here is a simple one: shop at Wal-Mart and get the store brand at roughly a third of the price of the other brands.

Coffee
I’m far from an expert on this category (as I don’t make coffee at home – keeping it as an out-of-home treat keeps me from getting addicted to the morning joe), but Consumer Reports identified Eight O’Clock 100% Colombian, Caribou Coffee Colombia Timana, and Kickapoo Coffee Organic Colombia as the three best choices.

In the stores I visited, Eight O’Clock 100% Colombian was the cheapest of the three by far, usually costing less than $5 for a 12 ounce bag of whole bean coffee. Here’s the trick, though – there were many coffees that were less expensive.

Since I’m not familiar with this area, I asked my wife for some input and she said that unquestionably, the price premium of the Eight O’Clock coffee over Folgers is worth it. She claims the volume difference in the containers is deceiving, since it takes substantially more Folgers to make good coffee than whole bean Eight O’Clock. So, three votes for the Consumer Reports model.

Tub & Tile Cleaners
Consumer Reports says Comet Scratch Free Disinfectant with Bleach, Ajax with Bleach Scratch Free, Kaboom Shower Tub & Tile, and Green Works Natural Bathroom Cleaner are the best choices, with Green Works being not quite up to the standards of the other but the best of the “natural” cleaners.

Coupons for Comet are extremely easy to come by and they reduce the cost of Comet below the store generic brand for that item. It works well for cleaning our tubs.

Creamy Peanut Butter
This was the one area where there was some debate. Consumer Reports identifies Smucker’s Natural and Smucker’s Organic as the two best buys for peanut butter.

Smucker’s Natural is substantially cheaper than Smucker’s Organic, ringing in at $2.49 for a 12 ounce jar at my store of choice. However, there were several peanut butters available for substantially less on the shelves. Having tasted Smucker’s Natural, I can say that it is quite noticeably tastier (much stronger peanut flavor) than many of the lower-end brands, and the texture is better, too. An ingredient comparison shows that it’s healthier as well.

For me, Smucker’s Natural would be the purchase if I had a coupon for it. Otherwise, I’d put off buying the peanut butter.

My Conclusion
From my experience, Bob’s strategy simply works if you’re trying to get the maximum value for your dollar (and not just seek the bottom dollar). This strategy pairs up well with looking at coupons and flyers, reducing the price benefit that the store brand has over the “best buy.”

Will I switch to this strategy? Perhaps not completely, but I am starting a list of the Consumer Reports best buys. It works surprisingly well.

Here’s how we maximize our coupon value, from top to bottom.

Meet Our Coupon Binder

The best place to start is the centerpiece of the system: our coupon binder.

It’s actually just a very cheap photo album with clear pockets and a binder that allows you to move pages around as you wish. Whenever we have a new coupon to add, we just toss it in the binder in the appropriate place.

Appropriate place? We sort our coupons by one criteria and one criteria alone: by expiration date. This makes it easy for us to quickly find and eliminate the expired coupons and also keep tabs on the coupons that are getting close to expiration.

Here’s a peek inside the binder.

As you can see, the coupons each have a pocket to themselves, so we can quickly flip through the book and find what we want. We keep multiples of the same coupon in the same pocket. Thumbing through reams of coupons is a giant waste of time and drastically reduces the cost-effectiveness of the coupon clipping time investment.

The Coupons We Clip

We have a pretty simple set of criteria for clipping a coupon.

First, is it something we’re sure we’ll use? If so, we’ll clip any coupon for that item.

Second, does the coupon have a face value of $1 or more? These are coupons that are usually used as part of a large marketing campaign for a specific product and are ones that are often paired with a sale in the store within the next month or two (the one month coupon strategy at work). If we might use the product (in other words, we use that type of product, but not necessarily that brand), we’ll clip it. It’s because of this that I’m currently using Herbal Essences shampoo and Old Spice body wash in the shower, for example – I wouldn’t normally buy those brands, but clipping big discount coupons and waiting for a sale made the items very cheap.

Third, is the coupon for an item that’s often cheap or on sale anyway? A good example here is breakfast cereals (which is why you see the Honey Nut Cheerios coupon in the binder above) – they’re usually low in price and regularly go on sale, too.

If a coupon hits one of these categories, we clip it. This means our binder is often close to full and we often toss about half of the coupons we clip, but the other half really save us a lot.

Where Do We Get Coupons?

On Sunday mornings, I usually clip coupons from the Sunday paper at the breakfast table while everyone’s eating breakfast. I’ll just quickly go through the coupon sections, cut the coupons we want, and save any store flyers I see (they’re important later). This is a minimal time investment, because we’d all be sitting there eating breakfast anyway, and it’s a good opportunity to teach the value of living frugally to the kids.

If the Sunday coupons are exceptionally good, I’ll go to the local convenience store really early on Monday morning and ask the cashier to let me pillage coupon sections out of the old Sunday papers. I’ll score ten papers’ worth of flyers and cut the goodies out of them the following Sunday.

On lazy evenings, my wife or I will do some web surfing, finding coupons at places like Coupons.com and Target.com. The latter is especially nice because you can use the Target.com coupons and manufacturer coupons at the same time on purchases at Target, so you can get stuff for free sometimes if you plan carefully.

If I identify some truly exceptional coupons (for example, not long ago I had coupons for $2 off a jug of V-8 Fusion – that’s the 100% juice V-8), I might hit up a coupon broker to send me a bunch of copies of that coupon. I just Google “coupon broker” and then pay someone else a few cents to dig through their flyers and clip the coupons for me.

That’s all we do. It takes very little time in a given week to collect all the coupons and toss them in the binder.

The Pre-Shopping Ritual

Each Friday evening (or sometimes Saturday evening), we’ll assemble a grocery list. We usually make up a meal plan for the next week, make sure we have everything we need for all of those meals, and then check on the status of our household staples (toiletries, milk, flour, etc.). This gives us the backbone of our list.

A note on the meal plan We usually base our meal plan on the flyer from the local Fareway – our preferred grocery store. We get the Fareway and Hy-Vee flyers (the two main local grocery chains) in the mail each week and then use them to prepare a meal plan, usually preferring the Fareway flyer (because it’s basically lower on almost everything, as we discovered after some careful pricebooking). We just identify the fresh items on sale in the flyer and then try to base meals around those fresh items.

We also go through the flyers and look for obvious loss leaders in the flyers. What items are on sale that are low enough to seem genuinely surprising? We try to match these up with coupons we have, so that if we add an extra item to the list, we’re adding something that’s only going to cost pennies and is sometimes free.

We then pull out all of the coupons that match up with items on our list and then put them in a few pages at the back of the binder for easy access when shopping.

The extra time added to our shopping planning by coupons is maybe ten minutes, tops. We put probably half an hour total into our shopping preparation, but our whole preparation plan saves us about $50 per grocery shopping trip, so it’s time well spent.

While In The Store

We take our coupon binder with us when grocery shopping, but we primarily just stick to our list. We do keep our eyes open for any unadvertised in-store specials – every once in a while, we’ll find one that matches up well with a coupon in our binder and thus we grab it immediately. Aside from this, we just follow the shopping list, then pull out all of our coupons from the back pages of the binder at the checkout aisle.

Our time actually in the store is vastly reduced compared to the time we’d spend without any preparation. The time savings here mitigates the time investment made with the extra planning.

Is It Worth It?

Two weeks ago (the last “normal” week around here that didn’t involve a weekend camping trip or other chaos), I kept track of the time spent with couponing. If you count the time spent at the breakfast table clipping coupons as time spent just couponing, we spent 23 minutes on coupons alone that week, and an extra 14 minutes on preparing a grocery list and meal plan, giving us a total of 37 minutes spent planning our weekly shopping trip. When in the store, we saved approximately fifteen minutes because we had a tight, clear shopping list to follow, so our total time lost to the coupons was roughly 22 minutes for the week.

The savings from the coupons alone was $21 on our final receipt, a slightly below average week. That means our “wage” for clipping coupons with this system was $57.27 an hour after taxes for the given sample week.

In reality, our savings from investing the time to properly plan our shopping was significantly higher than that, even. By sticking to a shopping list, we avoided many impulse buys. By planning our meals in advance in accordance with the fresh items on sale, we pocketed even more savings on our food purchases. These are additional savings that I’m not even attempting to quantify, but both are real and quite tangible.

Couponing is clearly worth it in our case. The relatively small time investment it adds to our shopping is well worth the real cash savings we realize from our system.

Let me address a few of the usual coupon complaints.

Couponing is stupid because you’re not buying fresh, healthy food. We rarely use food coupons at all, and when we do, they’re usually for breakfast cereals like Cheerios, frozen vegetables, yogurt, and occasionally ice cream. The vast majority of our coupon clipping is for hygiene items (like shampoo, soap, razors, etc.) and other household items (like dishwashing detergent, etc.).

For example, if you look at the picture of our coupon book above, you’ll see six coupons: one frozen yogurt coupon, one Cheerios coupon, one Ziploc baggie coupon, a toothpaste coupon, a body wash coupon, and a facial cleanser coupon. Not exactly a big pile of junk food – and we still save a lot at the store. Our actual meal planning is based around the fresh produce that’s on sale that week.

Couponing is stupid because it’s not cost effective and is a waste of my time. We get $57.27 an hour after taxes for something we can largely do in our pajamas at the Sunday morning breakfast table. If you think that’s a waste of your time, be my guest. I consider it a pretty effective use of my time.

Couponing is stupid because it’s all about consumerism. I don’t really care that much about consumerism if I can get soap for a quarter. I’m not seeking the latest products – I’m seeking cheap. If I can get cheaper quality items without the coupons, the coupons go in the trash. If you want to label that consumerism, feel free, but I consider it a pretty frugal methodology.

Here’s the real scoop: every item listed above cost us less than a dime. In each case, we saw a tremendous buying opportunity matching coupons to a sale and we simply stocked up big time on those items, leaving us with a large closet stuffed full with unusual items. I like to call it anticipation buying.

Anticipation buying revolves around four distinct principles.

First, there are some items that we will continually use over time. Soap, shampoo, oatmeal, Yogurt Burst Cheerios (without them, our son would riot), flour, sugar, some fruit juices, milk, coffee, razor blades, toilet paper – these are items that we use over and over again and continually need to stock up on. Because we’re aware of this, we can use a specific plan of attack for these items to get low prices on them.

Second, there are irregular opportunities to find such items on sale. These items pop up on sale on a completely irregular basis. Brand A shampoo might be on sale one week, then two weeks later Brand B will be on sale. Not only might national brands be running a promotion where items are on sale in stores, but individual stores might select different loss leaders to get people in the door.

In order to keep up on these individual sales, we just follow the grocery flyers in our Sunday paper (and in other flyers we get in the mail throughout the week). I usually have flyers for all of the local grocery stores and I keep an eye out for their big sales by reading their flyers each Sunday over breakfast.

Third, there are irregular opportunities to find strong coupons on such items. I clip every coupon for items in the above categories that are of acceptable brands from the Sunday paper, and if I see a very good coupon, I’ll stop at the local convenience store early on Monday morning and ask for the inserts out of the old Sunday papers (the cashier always says “Sure” and I start scavenging for coupon inserts). Sometimes, I can get as many as fifteen of the good coupons – if they’re for $1.50 off an item I know we’ll use frequently, it’s like cash in the pocket.

So, we patiently clip all coupons for these items and save them until there’s a sale, then stock up. I have the coupons. I have the flyers. I then just wait for them to sync up. Usually, it happens about a month or so after I clip the coupons (yep, the one month coupon strategy at work).

Another tactic to note: quite often, individual store flyers will have coupons that match the manufacturer’s coupons you have. Often, you can use these coupons simultaneously. So, let’s say my local Fareway ad has a coupon letting me get Herbal Essences shampoo or conditioner for $1.99 a bottle (limit 6) and I have three “save $3 on 2 bottles” coupon from the manufacturer. I just take all of them there and walk out with good shampoo and conditioner for $0.49 a bottle.

Here’s a real-world example. Recently, I had several copies of a coupon that permitted me to save $3 on any two bottles of Old Spice body wash. I waited until I noticed a sale – and not long ago, there was one at a local Walgreen’s. The individual bottles were $1.79 on sale there. I took in my wad of coupons and picked up ten bottles, paying $0.29 a bottle. I walked out of the store with ten bottles of soap, having spent less than $4 total – and it was just a five minute stop on my normal shopping trip. That’s how you save money.

What’s the long-term effect? The result from doing this regularly is quite interesting. Our regular shopping lists almost never have these “anticipation” items on it. Instead, they almost always just list the food items we need for the week, which means that at the grocery store, we rarely even visit big sections of the store. We mostly visit the produce aisle, the meat counter, the dairy area (for milk, etc.), and a few other specific places (pasta, canned items, bread when I’ve not made any), and that’s about it. Our grocery bills are cheaper and our shopping trips are actually quite a bit shorter because we’re not going over to the far side of the store to pick up shampoo or toilet paper – the time invested in executing this strategy is partially redeemed on ordinary shopping trips.

When I first started The Simple Dollar, I had a very simple coupon strategy that didn’t save me a whole lot of money. It’s been fun to watch the strategy evolve over the years – first syncing it with a grocery list and evolving that strategy a bit, then discovering the figuring out how sales and coupons synchronized and now evolving that strategy a bit. I used to believe that perhaps coupons weren’t worth the time invested, but I’ve found more and more that if you do it intelligently, there are some serious savings to be had – and it doesn’t take as much time as you might think.

At first glance through the book, it seems like a spectacularly good deal. Not only is your $20 helping out a local youth group or civic organization, you also get an enormous book of coupons for items from a lot of local businesses and chain stores. For me, the real value comes in the coupons for buckets of balls at a local driving range – you can buy one and get a bucket for free. This means that my $4 or $5, which would normally buy a single bucket of balls and thus provide me about an hour’s worth of entertainment suddenly becomes two hours’ worth, or else it lets me go bash some balls around with a friend for free (assuming of course my pal buys a bucket).

There are two reasons why a book of such coupons might not pay off – here they are along with strategies for overcoming them.

The first possibility is that you’ll end up spending more because you have the coupons. One good way to fend off this possibility is to go through the entire book of coupons soon after you get it, pull out all of the coupons that you’re pretty sure you’ll use, then get rid of the book so you’re not tempted to use some of those other “coupons” to spend money you shouldn’t be spending. I went through our book and pulled out somewhere around 50 coupons, then I proceeded to give the book to friends to pull out more coupons that they might use – I didn’t even want the temptation to “buy one, get one free” at a local coffee shop.

Another possibility is you might forget all about the book. The best way to do this is to keep the book out in a place where you’ll often see it. We do this by keeping the coupons we already pulled out in our coupon box, which we go through so often that we regularly see the ones we decided to keep. I also keep about three of them in my wallet at all times – almost always, I’ll carry one around to bat a bucket of balls at a driving range.

Here’s the bottom line on such books: if you look at it as a way to participate in a group’s fund raiser, it’s definitely worthwhile. I’d much rather have one of these books that could potentially save me some money rather than an overpriced item out of a catalogue that I don’t want at all. From a strictly frugal standpoint, it’s questionable as to whether it saves money – for example, I’m more likely to go out and whack away at a bucket of balls for $3 than for $6, but would I have gone anyway without the coupon? Still, if an “Entertainment” book is an option for you as a fundraising purchase, it’s likely a much better option than some of the other overpriced things you could be asked to buy.

We also usually take the time to leaf through the coupon flyers in the paper. There are usually one to four flyers that contain coupons from large food and consumer goods companies, usually touting various name brand products. We usually find about two to three coupons per paper worth clipping, and the savings is usually enough to pay for the paper and a bit more.

The question that most frugal people ask about this situation is how is this worthwhile? Most of the coupons in such sections don’t offer enough of a discount over the generic product to make it purely cost-effective. The ones that are cost-effective are often for products that we don’t buy anyway. So why look?

The real reason is there are about two coupons per issue that are really worthwhile, and finding them while eating breakfast is definitely worthwhile – for me. For example, a while back I found a $3 off coupon for Luvs diapers which, when used during the next grocery store visit on the least expensive package, got us 40 diapers for about two cents each – an incredible deal.

Is the time invested cost-effective? Probably not. If it doesn’t happen as a leisurely activity over breakfast, we usually don’t bother with the coupon section at all. It is simply not cost effective to browse the Sunday flyers for coupons as a separate activity. That’s not to say it’s a worthless activity – you can often save a buck or two from the browse if you know what to look for.

The best approach I’ve found? Browse through them very quickly, just looking for items that are very similar to things you regularly purchase. If you know the price and the coupon is worthwhile, clip it; if you don’t know, the coupon should be a dollar off at least before bothering. If you find one that’s really stellar for your use, you might find it worthwhile to find an online coupon broker and get a bunch of them. Using this quick rule of thumb might cause you to miss a coupon or two that’s worthwhile, but it will very quickly lead you to good coupons that are worth your while. Of course, if you don’t have that casual time with the Sunday newspaper anyway, the coupons aren’t worth the effort.

Remember The Milk
http://www.rememberthemilk.com

I wrote ecstatically about this site before, but the same still holds true: I use it to manage my grocery list, among other things. I just add items to Remember the Milk whenever I think of it, then when I’m out at the store, I fire up the mobile version of the site and there’s my shopping list right on my cell phone. This makes it incredibly easy to just follow the grocery list and get out of the store without spending extra money.

Coupons.com
http://www.coupons.com

This is basically the equivalent of printing money. When you have your shopping list ready, just visit this site and scroll through the pile of available coupons. Print the ones that match what’s on your list – most of them won’t, but I usually find one or two that do. I also like to visit the website of the grocery store I’m about to visit to pick up even more coupons. Quite often, five minutes of web surfing in this fashion can save me another $5 on a grocery store visit. No need to worry about clipping coupons at all; just print the ones you actually can use out before you go to the store.

FatWallet
http://www.fatwallet.com/

If you’re about to make a larger purchase, stop by FatWallet before dropping the cash. The site is basically a collection of deals on all kinds of products from various vendors, from computers to housewares. I looked at FatWallet just before buying my laptop and after about three minutes of looking around, I found a Dell code that knocked $300 off of the price. I’ve found other deals there, too, just by looking around a bit before making a planned larger purchase.

PaperBackSwap
http://www.paperbackswap.com/

PaperBackSwap is another site I’ve waxed ecstatic about in the past, but it still holds true: it’s an incredibly cheap way to get books in the mail at home. Basically, for every book you don’t want any more that you’re willing to ship via media mail to someone else who wants it (you’re matched up at the site), you can request any of the million-plus books there to be shipped to you for free.

What about other online sites?
Many people use such sites as Priceline.com and Shopping.com for online comparison shopping, and I agree that you can sometimes find deals by using them. However, I almost always find that the prices are slightly inflated at these types of sites. For example, I was recently able to find a very nice price for an airline ticket online, and it would have been quite easy to just click and order it. However, I just directly called the airline, told them the price that I could get online, and asked them if they could directly beat it. They did almost immediately by about $20.

In short, don’t believe in online comparison shoppers as the be-all-end-all of saving money. Although the prices are better than what you might find off the shelf, quite often a little more legwork can save you a little bit more than that. If you’re going to book a flight, get a hotel room, or other such things online, take an extra minute to call up the airline or hotel. Tell them the price you can get online and ask if they can directly beat it. Quite often, they will; by cutting out the middleman, you save and the airline or hotel might be making an extra dollar or two as well.

The same is true for comparison shopping. I’ve often found that once I locate the best price on a comparison shopping site, if I go to that specific site and enter directly, I can find the same item for the same price – or often cheaper.

Remember, comparison shopping sites are a tool to help you save money; they are rarely the ultimate answer themselves.

The funny part is that I really don’t spend very much time collecting the coupons. Instead, I effectively just hire others to do it for me – and still make a tidy profit. I merely visit a coupon broker once a week or so to see what they’ve clipped out of the Sunday papers and pay them a tiny fee for just the coupons I want. For a dollar or two, I get a big heaping envelope of coupons that I can basically directly take to the store and save money with.

Let me use an example. One great, easy to understand coupon broker is Kirstin’s Coupon Corner. She lists all of the coupons she has, along with a tiny price for each one.

Let’s say on Sunday evening, I assemble the start of a grocery list for next Saturday’s shopping excursion (I do this sometimes, mostly because cutting down to one grocery trip a week or less is a big money saver). I look through the cupboard and add the following items that I need to the list:
A tube of Crest toothpaste
A package of Luvs diapers
Dishwashing fluid (probably Dawn or generic)
Tabasco sauce
K-Y jelly
stewed tomatoes

I visit Kirstin’s Coupon Corner and I start matching up these items with coupons she has available:

$0.10 – Crest Paste or Liquid Gel $1/1
$0.10 – Luvs Jumbo pack or larger $3/1
$0.05 – Dawn .50/1
$0.05 – Tabasco Sauce .50/1
$0.10 – K-Y product (2.75oz or larger) $2/1
$0.05 – Hunt’s Tomatoes (11oz or larger) .45/3

I decide to get three of the Luvs coupons because it’s a stellar deal, so I request $0.65 in coupons from Kirstin, plus $0.39 in postage. I send her off a PayPal payment of $1.04 and this list of coupons.

On Friday, I open up my mailbox and there’s an envelope from Kirstin that I ordered. I take them to the store. How much do I save on stuff I would have purchased anyway? $13.45. It cost me $1.04 and about fifteen minutes extra time – and I didn’t even have to open up the Sunday paper. If you want to blow things out of the water even more, try lining up this strategy with a double coupon day at your local grocery store.

I schedule my primary shopping trip on Saturday mornings. The reason for this is that local grocery stores are usually offering a ton of samples at about ten or eleven in the morning on Saturday, so I can usually get most of Saturday’s lunch for free when I make multiple stops (and I usually do).

I also save coupon sections from the Sunday newspaper. I just pull them out when I’m reading the paper and set them aside for later use. If you don’t get a Sunday paper, check at a local convenience store on Monday morning and they’ll usually let you scavenge one for ads – something I’ve done in the past.

On Friday evening, I finish my grocery list. I make sure that everything I’m going to buy at the store is on it – all of my food items, toiletries, and so forth. I usually check a few of the essentials when doing this.

Then, I sit down with the saved coupons and clip everything that matches. Since I usually buy the brand that Consumer Reports recommends in bulk, I just look for coupons of those specific brands unless I spot an exceptional deal (like a recent $3 off on Luvs diapers, which made a small bag of them less than a nickel a diaper). Everything else, I toss. This usually nets me only a couple coupons.

I also do some online searching for coupons. I’ll check the coupon page at my local grocery store’s site, as well as a few general coupon sites, but I never print a coupon that doesn’t match up with my list.

I paperclip the coupons to my list and then go shopping on Saturday morning. In the store, I stick to my list and I still look for in-store bargains that beat the coupons, though these are rare. Sticking to the list ensures that I buy very few unnecessary things at the store. If I end up with any unused coupons, I save them for future weeks.

This process, both the individual pieces and in combination, has cut about 40% off of my weekly grocery / household / toiletry bill and I barely notice the difference.

First thing, pop open a new window with Froogle in it. This way, you can use Froogle yourself while following along with my example. You’ll immediately notice that the homepage of Froogle is clean, open, and very similar to the front page of Google itself. You’re immediately drawn to the search blank, so type in a product you’re interested in. For this example, I’m doing some video game shopping for my nephew, so type in Madden NFL 07 Playstation 2 in the search field.

You’ll immediately see a results page with a ton of options along the top; we’ll get back to these in a minute. The first thing to look at is the extensive listing of matching items that fills up the main part of the page. Right above this, in the upper right on the green bar, is an option for different sorting mechanisms for the results. By default, they’re sorted by relevance, but I often quickly switch this to “sort by price: low to high.” Give it a try.

Quickly, I realize that there is a flood of results here, so I add some criteria using the abundance of options along the top section. I don’t want to pay more than $40 for it, so I choose the “Under $40″ option, which quickly eliminates some results. I also click on “4 Stars and Up” so that I know that I’m buying from a reputable individual. With just a few clicks, I’ve pared the results down to just four matches, where I can see that I can get the game for as low as $37. From here, I can click on the item itself or just jot down the cost that I can get it at using Froogle and use it when shopping elsewhere. I saw it on the shelf recently at Target for $44.99, and it’s also available at Amazon.com for $39.99. Is the reliability and trustworthiness of Amazon worth the extra $3, especially if the shipping is free? Thirty seconds with Froogle brought this money-saving option to my attention.

Froogle is also a good way to find retailers for niche items. For example, I discovered a wonderful site with great customer response and prices on fragrances (Fragrance Shop, for those interested) and I’ll often take my business there if purchasing a new cologne or a bottle of perfume for my wife.

In short, it’s a highly valuable free tool for saving a good deal of money on the internet. I would estimate that Froogle has saved me $50 in the past year alone, and at least $20 this Christmas season so far.

The first thing I did was I laid out every single expense I had each month and asked myself what I could do to reduce them. I piled all of my credit card bills together in one place, my student loan bills together in one place, and so on. I then called each of the credit card numbers and simply told them that I am going to transfer all of my balances to one card and would they like my business? The first couple pulled my credit report and didn’t comply, but the third one did. I then proceeded to consolidate my student loans into one loan, and set up an automatic payment plan. With these two moves, I eliminated about 75% of the interest I was paying each month.

The next thing I did was I set up a loose monthly budget that I re-evaluated and tightened at the end of each month. I had so little idea of where my money was actually going that I didn’t actually save anything for the first two months – I just made large debt payments with my money. Once I realized where all that money was going, I was prepared to make even bigger changes in my financial life.

Once I understood my budget both in and out, I put strong caps on all of my frivolous spending. I allowed myself to spend a bit on entertainment, but I strongly budgeted it. I also began to cut down on frivolous spending even on things like groceries, where I taught myself how to shop in a much more frivolous fashion using tools like coupons and shopping lists.

The biggest step was making clear short term goals for myself. I clearly stated that I wanted my credit card debt gone and I wanted a two month emergency fund and I developed a week-by-week plan for getting that done. As I met the goal for each week, I began to develop a sense of pride as I watched my debt disappear much quicker than I would have ever thought possible.

The icing on the cake was I began to build up some savings so that disasters wouldn’t derail me. I opened up a high-interest savings account and set up an automatic deduction plan so that the money would simply move automatically into savings; all I had to do was mark it in my budget and savings would just happen. Soon, I was seeing the joy of compound interest and the peace of having an emergency fund.

Each of these financial moves helped to get me on track to righting the numbers, but how did I right my soul? Tomorrow, I’ll conclude this series by discussing the real lessons the road to financial armageddon taught me.

Want to jump quickly to the other Road to Financial Armageddon posts? Here’s an index to help you out.

#1: The Earliest Mistakes
#2: Early Profits … Lost
#3: Cash & College
#4: The First Taste of Real Money
#5: Love & Marriage
#6: The Yuppie Years
#7: Here Comes Baby
#8: Meltdown
#9: The Road to Recovery
#10: What I Learned

1. Switch your phone to VoIP. VoIP refers to the use of your home computer’s broadband connection as a telephone service. There are different programs that have various features and benefits, but they are almost universally less expensive than traditional land lines and cellular phones. Two of the most popular options are Skype (free to other Skype users, but fees for calls to non-Skype phones) and Vonage (flat monthly rate for unlimited calls in the United States and very cheap per minute internationally).

2. Utilize online-only savings accounts. In the past few years, a number of branchless, online-only, FDIC insured banks have cropped up that provide astoundingly high interest rates on a normal no minimum balance savings account. These rates tend to be eight or nine times as high as typical banks (which offer a 0.5% rate of return on average). Two of the most popular include ING Direct (currently offering 4.4% APY and very easy to sign up) and HSBC Direct (currently offering 5.05% APY). This means that investing $100 in an ING Savings account would return $4.40 in a year, or $5.05 at HSBC Direct, versus $0.50 at your typical bank. Plus, you can fully manage your account on your computer, transferring money to and from your checking account as you wish.

3. Combine your entertainment needs. A modern personal computer can replace your stereo, your television, and your video game consoles. You can move all of your music on CD to your computer using programs such as iTunes, then use your computer speakers to play back music when you want it. If you have a large monitor and a TV tuner card, you can use your monitor as a television by playing your television feed through your computer. You can also sign up for services such as GameTap to utilize your home computer as a video game console.

4. Keep an eye on your finances. I use online banking and credit card accounts to keep a daily tab on what’s in my accounts and what I’m spending my money on. This way, I know what I can afford to spend and what I can’t. Many banks and virtually all major credit card providers allow online account access, which gives you very easy control over your money. Beyond that, there are a number of excellent packages out there that enable you to manage your finances as a whole and do your own taxes, though they can be complex to set up. I use Microsoft Money, which can be downloaded for a 90 day free trial.

5. Sell your hobby. Whatever your hobby is, you can probably find a place to sell the products of that hobby. eBay is a great place to get started, though there may be better places for your specific hobby. Here’s an example: a friend of mine likes to fold simple origami pieces while doing other things, such as watching television; it’s a nervous tic for her. So she started folding lots of paper cranes. She was aware that a thousand paper cranes are often given as a gift among the Japanese, so she decided to start selling thousand crane lots on eBay. Thanks to her computer, she can sit at her rural home, watch television in the evening, and sell the numerous cranes she makes with her own hands.

6. Write about your random thoughts and interests. It is incredibly easy to get a simple blog at Blogger and put a Google AdSense bar on the side of it; Blogger walks you through the process very gently. With this, you can write anonymous random thoughts on whatever you want: your personal life, your favorite television show, whatever. You can just channel some of your own thoughts into a written form and post them. Not only does it provide an outlet for you to express yourself, it also enables you to improve your writing skill over time as painlessly as possible and you can earn a few dollars from the AdSense bar.

7. Do some comparison shopping. There are a multitude of places to shop online, and there are often many places selling the same item. For example, just for books alone, I used to check amazon, Barnes & Noble, and a few others. It’s easy to find a better price for an item than you might find in your own town. Even better, people are beginning to create software tools to make comparison shopping even easier. My favorite is Book Burro: when you view a book on a site like amazon.com using FireFox, it will pop up a little window immediately informing you of the cost of that book at various other online sites, helping you to quickly find the lowest price.

8. Throw out your reference texts. With an internet-accessible computer, there’s little need for such reference texts as a dictionary or a thesaurus or an encyclopedia. Wikipedia is a suitable replacement for an encyclopedia for general usage. Dictionary.com provides the same usage as a dictionary, and thesaurus.com is a functional thesaurus. In the modern world, there’s little need to invest in such reference texts.

9. Find a better credit card. We’ve all signed up for some pretty terrible credit card deals in the past, but the internet enables you to find a credit card offer that matches your needs much better. You can easily return 2% of your spending to yourself if you can locate a strong credit card offer. Even better, you can easily find balance transfer offers that will eliminate the interest you’re paying on a card. Obviously, a credit card is a tool that you need to be careful with, but I use one for my primary spending (groceries, etc.), keep the balance paid each month, and they literally pay me to use it. I would have never found this offer without the internet.

10. Use a computer as your cooking aid. Many people eat out because of the hassle of preparing food at home. It might not be tasty, you think, or you might mess it up. Plus, many people don’t want to invest in cookbooks or other methods of teaching themselves how to cook. Wikipedia offers extensive explanations of culinary techniques, even if you’re scared of boiling water. Plus, there are countless recipes available on the internet for dishes of all levels of complexity: RecipeZaar, for example, has thousands of recipes for beginning cooks. Not only will you learn a new skill, but you’ll quickly see how much cheaper it is to cook at home, a process aided by your computer.

11. Make your own calendars and other documents. Many people buy wall calendars for their home when a few printed pages will suffice. “But I don’t have a program that will make a calendar!” you say. Open Office is a free software suite that includes a word processing program, a spreadsheet program, and much more; even more important, it includes templates for making calendars, newsletters, and so forth. We use an old wall calendar for its pretty pictures and just tape printed pages over each month.

12. Save money when you travel. I am consistently surprised at the number of people who still choose to pay high prices by booking flights directly from the airline or through a travel agent when there are numerous easy tools online that will save you tons of money on your travel costs. Priceline, Travelocity, and Expedia all are amazingly easy to search and find the cheapest prices from your location to your destination and back – and they can sometimes save hundreds of dollars on your travel over calling a travel agent or directly calling an airline.

13. Print coupons before you shop. The internet provides unbelievably good access to coupons that you can use at your local grocery store, and a little bit of effort can transform coupons directly into cash. I check sites such as coupons.com before each shopping trip, checking to see if there are any manufacturer coupons available for items I’m going to buy, then just take them to the store with me and convert them to cash at the register.

14. Learn marketable skills. Your computer can teach you a lot, too. When I first purchased my computer, I was an atrocious touch typer, but I utilized sites like Learn2Type and TyperShark to teach myself how to type 80 words per minute. Want to know the intricacies of Word and Excel to better market yourself for a job? Microsoft offers extensive training on how to perform those tasks. You can also learn how to create web pages from scratch. Each of these skills will give you a leg up in the workplace.

The computer can be a very valuable tool – you just have to know how to use it.

The trick to visiting a supermarket and avoiding these impulse buys is to avoid them as best you can, and the best tool for this is to make a shopping list before you go and stick to that list. With a list of items you need and a desire to only get items on your list, it becomes much easier to cut down on those impulse buys.

For me, the worst impulse buy was a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. It’s a delicious, insidious little snack at a convenient price point that I would always pass by on my way to get milk or something else that I actually needed. Unsurprisingly, before I went with a list in hand and a goal in mind, a pint or two would always find their way into my cart. Now, if I get a strong desire for Ben & Jerry’s, I add a pint to the list, but most of the time I don’t splurge on it. Not only has it cut some pounds from my belly, it’s also saved me several dollars per store visit.

If you want to invest a little time, I’d recommend making a document that allows you to make sub-lists in general categories based on your store’s layout. For me, that means a “dairy” section, a “frozen foods” section, a “meat” section, and so forth. I use a Word template and print a new one off to hang on the refrigerator each week. This makes it even easier to stick to a list, because you do less searching for each item and thus are exposed less to frivolous items.

Here are five quick ways to build an efficient grocery list that will save you some serious money at the grocery store.

1. Cut your visits down to once or twice a week. I usually do one main visit per week (on Saturdays) and one smaller visit (usually on my way home from work on Tuesdays). This reduces the opportunities to buy frivolous things.

2. Start off each new list with the things you get every visit. For me, that means skim milk, orange juice, and yogurt – I don’t visit the store without picking up these three things.

3. Add things to your list as you discover you’re getting low on them. A good way to do this is by keeping a pad and a pen actually attached to the refrigerator so that it is central to places where you might find stuff.

4. Before you go, consider what you’ll probably eat at home in the next week. You don’t need to sketch out every meal, but have ideas for several meals before you go and make sure you have the ingredients for all of those, plus any additional foods you might want.

5. Check your coupon envelope. If you use a solid, non-intense coupon strategy, you’ll probably save some money for the shopping trip by hitting the coupon envelope before you go and updating your list to match.

The real key, though, is to stick to your list once you’re in the store. It feels like a real accomplishment the first time you see a smaller bill at the checkout and you look through your sacks and don’t see anything silly.

Then I had a baby, and I discovered the true value of coupons. Hint: if you buy diapers, baby food, and formula over and over again, coupons for diapers, baby food, and formula are as good as cash. It didn’t take long for this to spread out over our other purchases and now we have a nice hefty envelope full of coupons that we take on grocery ones with us (another tip: keep an envelope somewhere handy to keep coupons in so that if you see a useful one, you can just toss it in the envelope and look at it the next time you go shopping).

Here’s five quick ways to find coupons without burning a bunch of time hunting for them:

1. Pick up a copy of the Sunday edition of a major newspaper. There’s usually a few included sections of solid coupons. Clipping the useful ones takes just a couple of minutes.

2. Visit the website of your preferred grocery store chain before you visit. Many of them have coupon sections. I usually shop at Hy-Vee, which has a great coupon section.

3. If there’s something you buy a lot of, Google for it and add the word “coupon.” You’ll usually find something in the first few links. Around here, we buy a lot of Gerber baby food and Pampers diapers, so Googling for “Pampers coupons” or “Gerber coupons” usually points you to coupons or an easy method of getting them (like filling out a form or something).

4. Print multiple copies of any coupons that really wow you. We like to make frozen prepared meals about once a week, because we’re often stretched for time as it is and they are extremely easy to prepare. So when we found a $3 off coupon for Bertolli frozen dinners (which are quite good and very easy!), we printed a bunch of them and take one with us during each store visit.

5. Keep an eye out for double or triple coupon days at local grocery stores. There are a couple grocery stores nearby that have regular double coupon days; you can find out when they are by checking this list and then seeing if any of their chains (or subsidiary chains) are near you, then ringing the store to ask when they do them. Here, two different stores have double coupon days on different weekdays, so I often plan my shopping around these. I often get stuff for free (or very close to it) with double coupons – just yesterday, in fact, I got twelve containers of Yoplait yogurt (a popular item around my house) for four cents apiece.