Getting Started

Today was a big day for me: the day I embarked on my couponing adventure! Luke bought a paper today when he got the mail, and I was off and running :-) (Our local paper carries coupons on Saturday instead of Sunday).

I spent about an hour or so this morning reading through the material we received on Wednesday at our coupon class, browsing through moneysavingmom.com, cutting out coupons from the paper, and printing off more from the internet.
Later this afternoon, I went out to Walgreens for my first experience using a coupon! That I can remember, anyway. My cousins and I set off together, because they had been at the class Wednesday evening too. We put our heads together to find the best deals we could, and I think we made out pretty well! And the funniest thing happened right when we were checking out...a girl who had been in our class with us walked in with her giant binder full of coupons! We had a good laugh over that.

Anyway, in case you are curious to see what I purchased today, here it is: Two large boxes of cheerios (I probably wouldn't survive without my Cheerios), an 18 pack of tampons (I feel like my mom is going to be embarrassed by my brazen act of posting a picture of tampons on my blog. Sorry, Mom :-P) and a tube of toothpaste. Now, I normally pay somewhere between $4 and $5 on one box of Cheerios at Giant Eagle once every two weeks or so. So that fact that TWO boxes of Cheerios, plus everything else here only cost me $8.56 was pretty shocking to me! Here's how I spent under $9 on all of this:

Colgate toothpaste: Original price was $2.79. I had a coupon for $.75 off 1. So the final price of the toothpaste was $2.04.

The Cheerios were originally $ 4.59 per box. So that's $9.18. Today, Cheerios were buy one, get one free, plus I had a $1.00 off coupon! So both boxes ended up costing me $3.59 in all!

The tampons were originally $3.49, plus I had a $1.00 coupon from my cousin. So that's 2.49 in all.

Altogether with tax, that is $8.59...I SAVED $8.84!! So I saved more than I spent!

And that's not all. I got a $2.50 register reward that printed out. That's $2.50 I can spend next time on just about anything at Walgreens! I'm so pumped :-)

I also made my own little coupon binder. More on that later...I am leaving for a double date right now! And I didn't have time to proof-read this (I always proof-read my posts!) So I apologize if there were a lot of errors, or if anything didn't make sense!

Have a great Saturday! And if you don't use coupons, you should start!