Earning my keep

No such thing as a free lunch? I beg to differ. This morning at Target I used my coupon from Kashi for a free frozen dinner, and now, here I sit, eating a free (and actually healthy) lunch of Lemongrass Coconut Chicken. The fact that it didn't cost me a dime makes it taste even better.

Over the last few months I've slowly been sucked into the world of couponing. I'm not nearly as hard-core as some of my friends, but I've saved quite a bit of money nevertheless. This morning alone I saved $9 in coupons on my small grocery run, and I didn't even have to use very many as all of them were between $1 and $2 off. Besides the free lunch, I also scored deodorant completely free.

If you've never tried it, here are a few websites you could check out to get started:

Coupon Cravings
Money Saving Methods
Daily Savings from All You Magazine
Money Saving Mom
Stretching a Buck

(All of these can be added to your Google Reader, or whatever blog subscription service you use, which makes it very easy to read through their posts.)

Like I said, I'm not hard-core in the least -- I buy the Sunday paper only about half the time (as often as I remember), and I certainly don't print off every coupon known to man, but my theory right now is: if I already buy it (or at least might consider buying the same product by a different manufacturer), I'll use the coupons for it. If it is a good deal and I don't already purchase it (or something similar), I don't bother because no matter how good the deal is, if we don't already use it it will probably just take up space that we don't have. There is an exception to my rule, though: if it is free after coupons and something they can give away at our church's local food ministry, I'll also consider it. If I had more storage in my house, I might become more hard-core. But at least for now, I'm pretty pleased with how much money I've saved our little family. And so is my husband.