And the Winner Is. . . . .

Liz from Abundant Grace is the winner* of the Dog Days of Summer Bloggy Give-Away drawing here at Frugal Upstate!

Her question was:

I’m just starting to see the many benefits and deals you can get by being frugal and what blessings that come from it. Do you have any great ideas for getting coupons other than product websites?

Liz, here is the answer to your question!

To start off, I need to be honest. I barely ever use coupons. Really. Almost never. Here’s why:

#1 Coupons are for brand name items, and I am not very brand loyal. I find that the store brand at Aldi’s or Save a Lot can beat the price with coupon at a “regular” store.

#2 Coupons are frequently for “convenience” type foods. I don’t use many convenience foods, preferring to cook from scratch for both financial and health reasons.

But don’t worry, that doesn’t mean I don’t have ideas for where to get coupons. The most classic place to find coupons is in your Saturday or Sunday newspaper. We don’t read or get the newspaper here at the Frugal Upstate Household-Yankee Bill either reads a copy at work, or else borrows a copy from Nana (his mom). She’s a coupon clipper, so the good coupons are all denuded from the paper.

As you alluded to in your question, you can often sign up directly on a product’s website to get coupons. I did this with Huggies, Pampers and Gerbers when the kiddos were first born (in there case it was signing up for a “baby club”) and received fairly large denomination coupons-the first few were in the $2 range, then slowly they got to be less and less.

I have signed up with Vocalpoint, and get some interesting coupons and samples through them for new products. They often send a large number of coupons for you to “share with friends”. For example I got a “free box” coupon for Kashi’s “Go Lean Crunch” and then four $1 off coupons for “friends”. They sent me a free ladies razor along with a handful of $1 coupons to distribute etc.

There are also entire sites dedicated to printable coupons. Cool Savings is a large one that has been around for quite a while. I had joined it several years ago but found that I there weren’t very many coupons I was interested in, for the reasons listed in #1 and #2.

Lastly you can always check at the grocery store themselves. Some stores have those coupon dispensers mounted on the shelves (you know the ones, with the flashing red lights), or bins/bulletin boards up front where shoppers can drop off coupons that they are not using. Sometimes there are even fliers or “store” magazines that have coupons included.

So that’s it, the sum of my knowledge-limited as it may be-on coupons. I’m sure I have some brilliant readers out there who have even more great tips! If you’ve got some more ideas, please make sure that you post in the comments so we all can learn from you.

*Note: There were 80 commenters who met the requirement of posting a question for me to answer. I used the random number picker to choose a number (50), then counted the comments with questions until I got to #50-which was Liz!

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