A Time Investment sure to pay off!

When we were first married, Steve and I were broke.  We were rich in love (honeymoon stage for sure!), but completely broke!  Steve tells the story often of how he survived on 2 chicken nuggets mixed in with a packet of ramen noodles for dinner each day for weeks leading up to our wedding.  Thankfully, it wasn't long before someone told us about the wonderful world of couponing!

Everyone seems to have their own opinion on it, but for us, it has become the standard.  On our minimum wage paychecks we were forced to get extremely creative in the way that we lived, and couponing was one of the ways that we survived!  We would spend Sunday evenings going to local dumpsters, where Steve would bravely "dive in" and pull out as many of the treasured coupon inserts he could find, and then we would bring them back to cut out, sort through, and even import our coupons into an excel spreadsheet, preparing for our grocery shopping early the next morning.  (I say early, because it was important for us to beat everyone else to the grocery, so we would be waiting in the parking lot when the doors opened -- talk about extreme!)  With a monthly grocery budget of about $20, coupons became a way of life for us, and a hobby we learned to enjoy.

Things have changed a bit (luckily), and our grocery budget is a bit more than $20 a month, but our desire to coupon remains the same.  Today, instead of offering some quick financial suggestion that we've found to make our own household budget work better, I decided to provide my top 5 couponing sites.  Couponing takes time, and because of that, so many people immediately write it off.  However, if you learn to use the tools that are already made available to you, you can allow someone else to do the work for you, and limit your couponing "time investment" to a minimum.  In this way, you are saving money in record time -- something we all want!

Here's my top 5 sites:

www.southernsavers.com
www.hotcouponworld.com
www.thefreebiejunkie.com
www.thecouponconsultant.com
www.moneysavingmom.com

Give it a try!  Click on those links above, and I bet you'll be surprised at how easy couponing quickly becomes!