I am super excited to have a guest post today from Corrie over at “Cents”able Momma. She is sharing with us how she uses The Coupon Mom and Grocery Game websites to save money! Without further ado…
Hi, I’m Corrie from “Cents”able Momma. I’m so glad that Tia invited me to do a guest post on my coupon system. Unlike Tia, I am not so good at remembering prices of items in my head, so I only know the “rock-bottom” price for just a few items that I purchase quite frequently, without having to consult my price book. But, what if you don’t have the time to create a price book (or don’t really feel like doing it)? Or what if you hate clipping all the coupons that come in the newspaper inserts each week and trying to file them all away in the an organized process?
That’s where CouponMom and the Grocery Game enter to save the day! They match the sale prices with coupons and tell you what the percentage savings is from the regular price. They also tell you which inserts to find the coupons, so you only have to clip them when you need them (I store the inserts in a page protector by week in a binder. You can see my coupon organization process here).
CouponMom is a free site (you just have to register). You can browse the list of national chain stores (such as CVS, Walgreens, Walmart, etc.) or you can search by state for some of the more local stores. Once you pull up the list, you can sort by final price and percentage savings, among others. I started out using this site, but I soon discovered that unless you had a price book, you still didn’t really know whether those were good prices. That toothpaste may sound great at 75% off with the sale and coupon, but could I get it for a lower price?
That’s when I found the Grocery Game. To me, the Grocery Game is better than CouponMom because it includes both advertised and unadvertised specials, and, more importantly, it uses a color coding system for each item. A green item means that it is free after the sale price and coupons, a blue item means that it’s at rock-bottom prices so you should stock up, and black means that it’s a good price, but not rock-bottom, so only buy it if you need it now. The Grocery Game does the work for me…so I don’t have to be stringent about creating and keeping up with my price book.
One drawback to the Grocery Game is that you do have to pay to use the site. You can do a 4 week trial for only a $1 to see if the system works for you. After that, it’s $10 every 8 weeks (so $1.25 a week) for one store, and you can add additional stores for $5 for the same time period. I pay $1 a week for my newspaper for the coupons, so I just budget it as an additional expense that helps me save lots of money.
Also, because the list includes unadvertised sale prices, the list is not available until a couple of days after the sale period begins to give the Grocery Game a chance to update those unadvertised items in their database from a store walk-through. To compensate, I just adjusted my shopping day of the week to account for it. If items are out of stock, you can always ask for a raincheck.
If you do join the Grocery Game, please use my e-mail address as a referral (so I can get some free weeks). It’s ctermors at hotmail dot com.
Finally, what if you need to purchase an item from the grocery store that is not listed on either of the sale lists? Since, I don’t clip my coupons, I check the Grocery Coupon Database on Coupon Mom for each item that I plan to purchase to find any coupons that I need to clip and bring with me. Then, once I have all the coupons that I need for my trip, I will go through all my inserts and clip only the coupons that I need.
{ 0 comments… add one now }