Accountability and Responsibility

I’ve never been a big coupon clipper — neither were my parents when they were growing up. In the past few months, though, I’ve been trying to find a way to save some cash without making the coupon-hunting time be a waste of money. I know people who spend 10 hours a week to save US$15, and for me US$1.50 per hour is not worth my time.

When coupon-clipping has saved me the most has generally been in large purchases. I especially like preferred customer cards — Best Buy’s offers 3% cash back and we use it on all our purchases (and any family member who doesn’t belong to the program). Over a year we’ll get back almost US$500 in gift certificates based on all the purchases we convert from people we know.

Yet lately we’re trying a new idea. Many times during the week we’ll find ourselves unsure of exactly what to do. Since I now work primarily out of my home, getting out of the house more regularly is important. For a while, though, getting out of the house has been expensive as we’d go “window” shopping (spending money on things we didn’t need) or go to a restaurant (when we could have eaten at home). Now our new coupon-hunting time spent at home does double duty — it also helps us plan what we’ll do in the days and weeks ahead.

I picked up a simple little filing sleeve made of plastic. It has 15 8×5″ x 5″ sleeves and cost about US$7 at the office supply store. I labeled each file sleeve with a day of the week, starting on Sunday and going through the second Saturday. Using a dry erase marker I’ll also write the actual date next to each day of the week — planning for 2 weeks ahead or so.

When we sit down and spend our 1 hour a week or so looking through all the coupon mailers and online site coupons that we found, we plan our schedule around the savings. We find numerous restaurant coupons (up to 40% off sometimes) and a crazy amount of grocery coupons. We also find car maintenance coupons, travel and entertainment coupons, and the rest. We just dump the coupon right into the file on the particular day we plan on using it, and we’re set. Sometimes we’ll throw in coupons we’re only partially interested in — just in case we might find an hour or two free and want to head out of the house.

We’ve been following this trial for 3 weeks now and I am surprised at how much we’ve saved above our budget — almost US$170 in 3 weeks. We’ve prioritized certain days as “Go to this town” day, and we even prioritize each day’s coupons in the order of need: groceries and things that need chilling are put at the end of that particular file. For restaurants, if we don’t use a particular coupon on a given day, we can move it to another day as long as the coupon isn’t expired.

Coupon expiration is usually ignored by most retailers and restaurants, but this filing system also allows us to toss coupons that we know we can’t use, and when we come across them, we don’t have to even look if they’re still valid.

While we’re still working out the bugs — and finding new features — this system is working great for us and I can’t wait to see how much time and money we end up saving by combining two of our trickiest acts into one, with both acts helping one another. By managing your schedule and your coupons into one process, you’ll likely see even more savings than doing just one or the other, or both separately.

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