People who enjoy extreme couponing use every tip and trick at their disposal to ensure that they get the best possible deals at the right time.
Massive savings are not the only benefit that clipping coupons can offer your household. In fact, many extreme couponers often see this practice as a personal mission.
The thing that differentiates extreme couponers from regular coupon clippers, is the fact that they dedicate a lot of time and effort to ensuring that they use all of the tricks at their disposal to get the best possible deals.
The benefits of couponing
With living costs increasing all over the globe, many households have been making the extra effort to ensure that they cut down on unnecessary monthly expenses.
Often, the best way to ensure that you are saving money where you can is to start with the biggest expenses first.
Using coupons for various in-store and bulk deals is a great way to stretch your monthly grocery budget further.
However, it seems like what drives most avid couponers is a personal mission to save as much as they possibly can every time that they visit the store.
How does extreme couponing work?
While most people enjoy saving a few dollars now and then by using a coupon that they happened upon while paging through the newspaper, the kind of savings that extreme couponers are used to takes an incredible amount of time, organisation, and dedication.
The main distinction between regular couponers and extreme couponers is that extreme couponers use every avenue and trick in the book to save as much as they possibly can when they do their shopping.
Some extreme couponers can save up to 90 percent per shopping trip. This is not only achieved by searching for coupons in newspapers, but also by finding the best websites for coupons and signing up for various cash-back promotions that are run by retailers or other third parties.
However, while you need coupons (and many of them) to be successful at extreme couponing, this is not where the dedication to this practise ends.
After you have collected as many coupons as you possibly can, you need to organise these coupons so that you can use them strategically to get the best possible deals at the right time.
Extreme couponers are also experts at organising the items that they have purchased in bulk so that they can use them as needed.
Extreme couponing requires that you strike the perfect balance between your household’s needs and the retailer’s sales cycle.
After all, the best way to save is to ensure that you have a high-value coupon for an item that is already on sale and that you really need.
Extreme couponers strike this balance by combining their stacks of coupons with their knowledge of the coupon jargon in order to get the best deals possible when the opportunity arises.
How to get started with extreme couponing
The concept of saving hundreds of dollars on your grocery bill every month by spending some of your free time couponing may seem enticing, but extreme couponers often spend up to 40 hours a week just searching for the best deals.
This is why many extreme couponers recommend that you start off by focusing on a single store to get the hang of searching for, organising, reading, and using your coupons at the right time, before you dive into more stores and a wider variety of coupons.
The significance of studying your coupons
The thing that often distinguishes extreme couponers from regular retail customers who use their coupons casually is the fact that extreme couponers study the jargon and fine print of every coupon that they clip.
This means that they can take full advantage of special deals like stackable coupons or coupons that double-up. Furthermore, they can even choose the best deal when two stores have a coupon for the same product.
Tricks that extreme couponers use to get the best deals
Extreme couponing, by nature, requires that you spend extra time and effort on tracking down, and taking full advantage of as many coupon deals as possible.
However, experienced extreme couponers usually also have a few tricks up their sleeves that help them to ensure that they do not overspend.
Some of these tricks include:
- Buy items in bulk when they are at the lowest possible price instead of searching for deals when you run out of a particular item
- Be willing to be flexible with the brands that you buy and the retailers that you buy from in order to ensure that you get the best possible deals
- Focus on buying items that you will actually use
