Latest Obsession

     My latest obsession (beyond Pinterest and Pioneer Woman) is Couponing.  A little on the verge of extreme.  When we were in Oklahoma in October we watched an Extreme Coupon marathon and the more I watched it the more I realized I could do that!!
    I found the Krazy Coupon website which I use EVERY DAY to tell me where the deals are and I've been doing it for about 9 weeks now and at the beginning I didn't see any difference in my groceries at all...but just this month I realized that I have cut our grocery bill..IN HALF!!  This is huge for us.  I'm not getting $500.00 worth of groceries for $20.00 like on the show, because California does not double coupons (dang).   
     It takes some work....no it takes a lot of work, it's like a part time job and I won't lie and say it only takes a few minutes...it takes me a total of about 8 hours a week to do it.  That includes shopping, clipping and organizing time.  It saves us about 3-400 dollars a month (which I can use to pay other things) and my stockpile is beginning to grow.  I now have enough (and all name brand thank you, there are no coupons for store brands) food each week to cover what we eat, as well as add to our overage.  In 9 weeks I have added all this (the freezer was almost empty when I started)....I know it needs to be defrosted...how do I defrost it when there's stuff in it?  I think it may never get defrosted!

Here's our 13 boxes of cereal (Mike's the only one who eats it, that should last a while!) I think we have enough toothpaste for a couple years, as well as laundry detergent and dish soap. I don't need 400 hand soaps, but 20 (they are in the back) should hold us for a while.

 And here's all my soups and canned goods, and toilet paper.  See that toilet paper?  I got it today, I paid $6.45 for 6 12 packs of toilet paper......that my friends, was the deal of the day and should last us a good long time! I hope to get my grocery bill down from 600.00 a month to about 200.00 a month (I include diapers in that - that's a big chuck of our bill). I'm getting closer, soon I should just have to buy perishables and we can live off our stockpile.  The downside, you can't plan your menu by what you want, you have to plan it by what you have.

Once I got things organized into a binder it didn't take me long to figure out how to plan my purchases.  I buy 10 newspapers each Sunday, from an old guy named Johnnie who always gives me 15.  The hardest part is separating the inserts and cutting all the coupons, sometimes I can get Mom to help me and that makes it really nice.  We cut all the coupons and then put them into this binder.  It weighs about 13 pounds.  When people see me with it in the store they either tell me they wish they had the time to do it, or they ask me where stuff is because they think I work in the store and am taking inventory.
                                         Here's my binder

Here's the table of contents, all title pages are downloaded from Krazy Coupon Lady....they seriously do all the work for you!

Here's a page with coupons, it's the pages you collect baseball cards in, so most coupons will fit in the little pockets.

So here's to couponing! I'm calling it my part time job!