It's Sunday

It's coupon day, time to run out and buy your papers.

I get asked all the time, how do you get so many coupons?  Well here are a couple methods.

The first and most common is buy multiple Sunday papers.  How many you ask? Well that depends and a couple things.  How much do you plan on buying? How big is your family? What are you buying for (just your family or also for giving to charity/food banks)? What kinds of coupons are in the paper this week?

For me I normally buy 3-4 newspapers a week. This week I am only going to buy 2. Why? Well based on the coupons that are in the paper, there are not many that really interest me, not that I won't use them.  Now last week there were some good dog food and formula coupons in the paper, so I bought 4, the week before that there were 6 inserts in my local paper, and many of the coupons were for products I used every day, so I went over my norm and bought 5 papers.

Another way of getting coupons is through social networking, aka, asking friends and neighbors to save the coupons they don't use.  With social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, it is very easy to get out the word that you will take any unwanted coupons. I also use this method, the only problem with this is that you can end up with a bunch of picked over coupons, left overs. I am very grateful for the coupons that I get from friends, they allow me to do a lot of couponing for charity and also help supplement coupons for my large family. But I still buy papers so I can be sure to get all the coupons I need for my family.

And finally, dumpster diving.  Many people read these words and think, "eeeewwww, never!".  I admit to being one of those people, until the day I stopped by the local recycling center and realized it is basically just a matter of looking though some papers.  I take a pair of rubber cleaning gloves with me, just in case, and just sort through what is reachable and on top.  No you do not have to actually go into a dumpster full of everyone's trash and last night's left overs.  This is not something I do regularly, but if I am low on coupons, or there was a good insert that came out in the last couple weeks and I am passing by, I may stop just to see what is on top.  A couple words of advice, if your recycling center is outdoors, don't go if it has been raining, and be sure to check the dates on the coupons before you take them to be sure they are not expired.

Now there are many other ways to get coupons, like printing off the internet, but I will cover that in another post.


Have you found a creative way to build your coupon collection?  Don't hesitate to share it with us.