Living on a Dime

My primary focus is to continue to be able to stay home with my children and homeschool them.  Therefore, I am always searching for new ways to save my family money.  Our largest expense?  Groceries!  Two years ago I began couponing.  I stockpiled everything that I could and really saved our family some big money!  My husband was unemployed for a long while this past year which gave me the opportunity to really see how couponing could save our booties!  We also moved to a new city, so have recently unpacked all of the MANY boxes that contained our stockpile items.  Here is my conclusion:

During our time of unemployment, the only non-food item that we purchased was toilet paper!  Praise be to God!  I had stockpiled enough of everything else that we use on a daily basis to get us through that rough time!  While that is a wonderful testimony to using coupons, there is another side to it.  I was ordering coupons from a wonderful supplier, 10 sets per week.  This cost me an average of $85 per month.  So, when I found an item that was a great stockpile price, I would get 10 of them (or 20 if the coupon was on 2).  These food items collected pretty quickly and I was so very proud of my stockpile!  While we used a ton of stuff that we had in our cabinets and pantries, a whole bunch of stuff became outdated before we did anything with it.  Another mistake!   We spent quite a few months in and out of town looking for a job and I wasn't able to pay attention to my stockpile like I should.  If I had realized a lot of this food was about to expire, I could have donated it to a food bank.  Unfortunately, when we finally moved and unpacked all those boxes, I had to throw away most of it.  Many items that we had not used any of.  Therefore, money down the drain!  A couponer's NIGHTMARE!

So, what I have decided is to limit my purchase of coupons to only clipped.  I have a wonderful supplier and I can spend about half of what I was before and only get the coupons that I will actually use.  Also, I will restrain myself from purchasing 10 or 20 of one item unless I'm positive that we will eat it or it is a non-food item that will never go bad.  Lessons learned!!

Next post... another way I am learning to save money on food!