You’ve Got Your List - Now What?
C) Stacking Coupons
-To maximize your savings, ideally you would wait to purchase an item until it was on sale. Better yet, you would wait until it was on sale AND you had a coupon to use!
-As you look at your needed items for the week, based on your menu plans, as well as when you look for your ads, you want to use as many coupons as you can to get your final price as close to zero as possible.
~This is why knowing what you have on hand is useful - if I know that I use 2 boxes of cereal per week, and I have 4 boxes left in my cupboard I will know that I should probably take advantage of a cereal deal if one comes along.
~If I didn’t know that I only had around 2 weeks of cereal left and passed up a sale, I might not have another sale come around before I ran out of cereal - this is when you are forced to pay full price and can really blow your new budget fast!
~Be sure you know the store’s coupon policy - most stores will allow (1) store coupon and (1) manufacturer coupon per item. The ultimate savings come from a sale price + a store coupon + a manufacturer coupon for a single item!
-For frequently used items, being able to use a coupon in addition to purchasing items that are on sale give you the ultimate savings.
