Coupons

Last weekend when I went grocery shopping my bill at check out was $130. Yes you saw that right I said one hundred and thirty. Needless to saw the hubs was less that thrilled at the total especially when we are trying to save and make cuts to out budget.

I recently watched a few episodes of "Extreme Couponing" on TLC and could not believe how much money these people were saving on their grocery bill, one family walked out of the store wilt over $700 in grocers and paid less than $0.01 for everything. They have these massive stockplies in their basements, cupboards, closets, garages, ect so I guess they wil never go hungry or will never run out of laundry detergent, but it seems a little over the top to me. I mean who really needs to have 127 bottles of laundry detergent, or 70 jars of mustard.

Back to the reciept from my trip to the grocery store. I sat down with it to try and figure out where I was spending all my money and figured wou that I spent just about $20 on fresh produce, $20 on dairy, $25 on fresh meat/fish, and $7 on bread so that was $72 dollars right there plus the cost of a book of stamps. The remainder of my bill I will admit that there were probally items that I could have used coupons for if I had one ( I think I had 4 this trip that I used). Recently a co-worker of mine brought in a giant stack of the coupon inserts and I went through them I think I cut out like 7 coupons, the rest of them were for stuff I would never use. I just don't see how the people who save that much do it.

Then I started thinking most of those people say that they do not buy something unless they have a coupon for it. So does that mean that they never buy fresh produce or fresh meats? Only canned, jared, or frozen foods?  How is this healthy? I am trying to change the way we eat in my efforts to lose weight and part of that has been to cut out most processed food. Maybe I am not looking in the right places but the only coupouns I seem to find are for processed foods, cleaning products, and beauty/ personal care products. If that is the case how do I save using coupons with the exception of the cleaning  and personal care products that I buy very rarely?

So I will use the few coupons I find for the products we use but I am pretty sure I will never get to walk out of the grocery store and be the person who got $700 worth of grocerys for $0.01 unless of course someone can tell me where to find coupons for produce.