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Christine Donaubauer has discovered how to "win" using coupons. |
However, back on the home front, there is another “sport”
played in the living rooms and grocery aisles across America – coupon clipping.
“I’m always trying to find the best deals,” said Christine
Donaubauer, Community Financial Credit Union quality assurance manager. “That’s when it becomes a sport.”
Like the Olympic athletes, Donaubauer is still an amateur
coupon clipper; “certainly not extreme” like people on some recent reality TV
shows.
She got started after her daughter was born six years ago,
when the additional costs of food, diapers and other baby needs were adding up.
“I’d
go to the store and spend $200 a week, so I finally looked at some of the
coupons I’d get in the mail and started to realize how much I could save,” Donaubauer
said. “I saw I could cut that spending
down to $60 or $70 per week.”
To keep herself organized, Donaubauer kept coupons in an
envelope, but as she expanded her clipping operation, she’s outgrown it and
moved on to a binder, similar to what baseball card collectors use to keep
their cards safe.
While her couponing has grown, her shopping has reduced.
“The one thing I had to let go of was shopping every week,”
she said. “If I went every two weeks, I
spent less money because then I could really figure out what I needed and make
things stretch a little bit more at home.
And once you get used to shopping less, you figure out how to stock for
a few weeks at a time.”
Getting started with coupons is simple for anyone to do,
Donaubauer said. They just need to start
looking at the circulars that come through the mail, or the flyers in the
Sunday paper and think about what they buy and what they need. Coupons are also going digital; stores like
Kroger now let customers load coupons on their loyalty cards so they don’t even
have to keep track of the paper version.
There are also some misconceptions about coupons as well.
“The most common misunderstanding is that the only things
you can get deals on are processed or junk food – that’s not true,” she
said. “There are coupons for things like
organic milk, yogurt and other healthier items.”
One of the side benefits of saving money with coupons is the
ability to put those savings towards higher quality meat and produce.
Donaubauer said she is reminded of why she clips coupons
whenever she happens to pay full price for something.
“It is amazing when you see that last number pop up and you
think, ‘Wow! I just had to pay that much for that thing,” she laughed.
Then the competitive side creeps in, and she vows to keep
clipping.
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