ABOUT ME In my spare time I enjoy donating my stockpiled groceries and health and beauty items to places that need them (think homeless shelters and food banks) and I love to scrapbook when I have time and I also love to read. What you'll learn here: I also see a lot of sites that advocate using coupons on trial sizes. As long as the coupon doesn't exclude it that's fine, but I'm not really a fan of that because it opens you up for scrutiny from stores and you can usually get the full-sized item free. I'd rather use that coupon to get a free 1 oz. bottle of eyedrops than a .5 oz. trial sized one AND not have to deal with suspicious store employees.
I'm Sarah. I love to save money. I used to be someone that always bought store brands and felt great saving $10 with coupons on $100 worth of groceries. In the last year, however, I had twins and life changed but I wanted to still maintain our same standard of living. I had to learn quickly how to save money and spend less in order to make that happen. I jumped in feet first to learn how on my own, and now I want to help you learn. There IS a learning curve. You will make mistakes, but your savings will astound you once you get going. The best part is that it doesn't require hours and hours of coupon clipping or deal chasing. Also, if you stick with me I'll show you how to do it the legit way, without coupon fraud (like some blogs) or doing questionable deals. Everything I'll show you is above board and you'll be able to leave the store holding your head high and being proud of the money you've saved.
Who I am: I am a wife and mother. I have three sons: 1 year old twins and a 5 year old. I am also an animal lover. I have three cats and just recently lost my sweet, funny 5 year old Labrador Retriever mix named Stanley to lymphoma.
If you ever have questions or have a deal to pass on, just leave me a comment in a post or e-mail me at supersaversarah@yahoo.com. I love reading and responding to reader questions.
I always got frustrated when reading other money saving blogs because I'd read things like this:
Walgreens sale:
buy item x for $9.99
use $1 manufacturer coupon
get back $8 Register Reward
final cost: $.99
Then I would get frustrated because although that blog might list the final cost of the item as only $.99, I'd see they were subtracting the Register Reward off the top. The Register Reward prints after the sale and it is not cash back, so you are actually paying $8.99 out of pocket and getting $8.00 Register Reward back. Still a good deal, but when you are paying $8.99 out of pocket it is very different than paying $.99 for something.
Some bloggers and coupon sites think nothing of advocating coupon fraud to get a deal. There are enough legit deals out there that no one needs to even attempt to do anything "wrong" to get a good deal. I'd see sites advocating using a "face cosmetic" coupon for eyeshadow or nail polish. Yes, technically eyeshadow goes on your face, but that is not what the manufacturer intended it be used to buy. You won't have to worry about these kinds of deals here.
Also, you will not see complete ad matchups here. Some blogs do complete matchups and I always found myself wading through to get the good deals and wondering if something was really a great deal. I'll list free stuff and things I think are truly a good deal.
I am going to try to simplify things and give a "just the facts" approach to couponing and deals. If a store doesn't have any great deals that week, I won't be posting about that particular ad.
WHY COUPON?
Did you know an hour spent clipping coupons usually yields $100 worth of savings? Check this out! It's well worth your time to coupon and take a little time learning how to save money. For a family of three, I was spending $100-200 a week on groceries and lived mostly on house brands and generics to get by. Now, we buy mostly name brand everything and if I spend more than $50/week on groceries it's a bad week. I used to get a coupon in the Sunday paper for product x and use it that week, figuring that $1 off $3.59 for product x wasn't so bad. Now I've learned to wait a week or two and product x will be on sale for $1.25. Doesn't $.25 sound a lot better than $2.59? I've only been doing this for about 9 months, but there are so many deals to be had that even a short amount of time matching up coupons to sales will shrink your grocery bill and help your budget.