TLC Extreme Couponing Guests Making Couponers Look Bad

Last nights TLC Extreme Couponing featured their youngest participant ever. He was a high school student who from what I got from the show was saving items for college. He had the usual laundry detergent, deodorant and body soap. They this is when it got interesting. He laughed about having this huge supply of maxi pads and not knowing what the wings were for. Then he showcased a mammoth supply of baby formula and bragging how it was free.

My question is why isn't he donating this to a local food pantry. There are thousands and thousands of needy families across the United States who have problems feeding their infants. Food pantries have a hard time keeping stock of baby formula and its not like he can keep them for when he has kids there are short expiration dates. He makes it look as though extreme couponers are hoarders. This is what gives us couponers who are just trying to save money a bad name.

Now you may not know this but I am an extreme couponer. You will not be in line behind me with a $700 transaction because the reality of the regular couponer is that they do not have transactions that large. I just started couponing about a month ago. You would not believe what I have accomplished in that short period of time. Going into couponing I did not expect some peoples reactions to be so strong. Some people will come up to me asking advice others will sneer their nose up and will say "oh you are one of those coupon people". When I was shopping at a local grocery store, I was told of a new coupon policy. I was trying to use 6 of the Free Dr. Pepper 10 coupons and was told that I could only use 5 at a time. I asked about this "new" policy and was told that it was because the of the Extreme Coupon show because people "like me" will buy hundreds of the product and will clear the shelves leaving nothing for everyone else. First, I only had six and second aren't the stores in business to have their shelves cleared isn't that a good thing can't they just order more? Well you know what I mean. They went on to say "you people" hoard and don't even use your merchandise we are saving it for people who use it.

Yes, I have a stockpile, a very small one so far that consists of 5 different kids of cereal, maybe 5 boxes of each; 10 boxes of pasta; 6 jars of pasta sauce; 10 tubes of toothpaste; 6 shampoos; 3 conditioners; 10 Snack Packs of Chips; 20 bottles of soda; fruit snacks; 8 boxes of granola bars; 20 boxes of Hamburger Helper and 4 mens/ladies deodorant. For a family of 11 that is a small stockpile. It may be small but I am already saving money. Week one I save like $30, weeks two through three around $50-80 and this week I decided to shop from my stockpile as we needed all our money for a trip we are taking this weekend. So this week I spent $65 on our groceries down from $250 a week. Quite a savings, eh? I am not in couponing to hoard merchandise that I will not use. One week I got a bunch of razors that I brought in to a local food pantry. That is what most couponers do. They either buy extra for food pantries or they just buy what they need. We are not hoarders.

Come on fellow couponers let's stick together and put out the good word about what we are really about.

The Worst Halloween Candy to Give Out

With Halloween knocking on our door I am already dreading the candy interrogation that my husband and I have at the end of the festivities. This is how my day will go.

First since Brendan and Logan are now home schooled I will have a little party for them. We will make mummy hot dogs for lunch, cup cakes and play a few games after all their work for the day is complete. See I am so mean. Maybe I should have them march around the yard in their costumes to make up for them missing their school parade.

When Tim, and the rest of the kids get home from school, they will hang around for a bit and then get dressed for the first part of the night that I hate. We will go door to door to door. I hate this part for two reasons. First, I feel like we are begging for food. Now we are asking for candy. Tomorrow we will be asking for boxes of cereal and milk. I also have a hard time walking even short distances because of my back trouble so even though I hate the concept of Trick or Treating after I am dropped off at home I feel as though I am missing their fun. My husband will continue Trick or Treating with them door to door to door. He will go with them dropping off one child at a time as they get tired. By around 830pm, the entire gang will be home. They will get undressed and the candy interrogation will begin.

The candy interrogation works one bag at a time. We dump the bag out on the table and begin by getting rid of all the hard candy. I might sound like a nut but I have this fear that one of my children are going to choke to death on a piece of hard candy so I just do not let them have it. I have that same fear with bone in chicken, but that's a different story. So hard candy is very bad to give out to children on Halloween because of the high choking possibility. Next, we remove all candy with a twist wrapper. This would include candy such as Tootsie Rolls, Smarties, you know what I am talking about. Does that sound crazy to you? I remove this candy because there is no way to tell if it has been tampered with, and I certainly not gonna take any chances. Sure I got extra kids but I want to keep them all, well on most days anyway.

So when out shopping for candy but candy that has a sealed package and don't buy hard candy! Till next time, Adios! I gotta go Extreme Coupon is coming on and I love that show.

Save - Mother Earth & Grocery Bill

Well with all the saving going on in the world with Extreme Couponing on TLC, I decided that with so many kids that I had to give it a try. After all who am I not to try something new especially if it involves saving money. I have $250 per week budgeted to feed our family. That may sound like quite a bit but it does not buy much except the basics. This means cookies only once a week, and ice cream maybe once a month and only if on sale. So I did some research and found out that to be an effective couponer you should be getting one set of inserts, the coupons found in the paper, for each member of your family. This number rises if you have teens. Well since I have 6 teens I should be getting many more than the 11 recommended copies. Since I didn't want to waste any money in the beginning I only started with 10 copies of the paper for the first two weeks. I went home and cut and cut and cut. I enlisted the help of my husband and older kids and we all cut. I discovered quickly that stacking them very carefully would get the coupons cut out much quicker. By the 3rd week I was getting 15 copies of the coupons.

So I joined the most popular blogs I could find, my favorite being Krazy Coupon Lady and right from the first week started getting free stuff. By the 2nd week I discovered Couponmom.com which actually tells you how much you are saving by percentage. I learned that the grocery stores work on a 12 week cycle and if something is 65 or 70% or higher off the regular price that you should buy how much your family needs for a 3 month period because that is how long it will take for the item to be that price again.

So we are at the end of 4 weeks and I have a small stockpile built. We have 20 boxes of cereal, 15 boxes of toothpaste (all free), 9 shampoo, 4 conditioner, 30 hamburger helper .........

This week we are going on a trip for wrestling so we need all the money we have for the trip. So I decided to shop from my stockpile for meals and you wouldn't believe how much our food is for this week - $65. That's right and we are only having hamburger helper twice.

So I decided to carry this money saving venture over to our utilities. Everyone including my children want to save the planet but never want to save us money, so they could not see through my motives. So I found some information on saving the planet online. So we had a family meeting two weeks ago and told everyone that we wanted to do our part in saving water for the planet and saving electricity too. So we asked the girls to turn off the water in the shower while waiting for their conditioner, and asked the boys to shorten their shower by 2 minutes. Everyone started off by timing their normal shower. Well it is already paying off. We got our first monthly gas bill and it is $25 less, yeah!!! Let's hope the electric and water bill has dropped too.