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Health & Fitness

How It All Began: The Early Days of My Extreme Couponing

How I learned to use extreme couponing to save money and give to charity.

It all started when our beloved department secretary retired, and we hired Maureen...Maureen casually mentioned that she is a frugal shopper, and I said that if she saw any good sales at Staples she should let me know, because with the economy being what it is, everyone's budget gets crunched, and I thought I could get some office supplies for the department.  A few minutes later, Maureen brought me a coupon for a free packet of Staples sticky notes...About a $12 value!  When I realized it had been printed off the Internet,  I printed a couple more, and came in to work the next day with four packs ($48 worth!) of sticky notes to lay at Maureen's feet (rather like a cat bringing its owner a dead mouse).  That was it -- I was hooked!

Maureen introduced me to the best couponing blog in the world:  Cindy Livesey's www.livingrichwithcoupons.com -- and I started tracking sales and clipping coupons like a madwoman.  My friend Karen started giving me the coupon inserts from her newspaper, and I was enjoying trimming $10 and $20 off each grocery bill...Then Rutgers announced its fall food drive.  They asked the Rutgers community to donate a different kind of food each week, and the first week was breakfast cereal.

Coincidentally, there were a couple of really good sales on General Mills cereal, plus a whole lot of online coupons, and with one thing and another, I wound up sending 28 boxes of cereal to Rutgers with William...And, by my calculations, I MADE $2.79 in the course of getting this cereal!  Now I was an official Monster Couponer, and it occurred to me that I could get things for the Calico Cat Cupboard (the food pantry in Middletown which is supported by our church, Holmdel Community United Church of Christ, along with a group of other area churches known as the Community Outreach Group).  So I started doing this couponing seriously.  I cut huge amounts off the cost of our own groceries, and set myself a cap on how much I could spend each week on things for the Calico Cat.  These days, every week I have a trunkload of goods to send off to Calico Cat -- cereal, Hamburger Helper, cans of soup, rice...All kinds of foods.  Also, I shop at pharmacies and get cleaning supplies, toiletries, and over-the-counter medications.  We literally bring hundreds of dollars worth of food to Calico Cat every week!

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I'll be running introductory workshops on Extreme Couponing after the service at Holmdel Community UCC -- at about 11:30, September 18 and 25 to get people moving on a BIG food drive for our denomination's Mission: 1 (www.ucc.org/mission1/).  Open to the public!  For directions, call 732-946-8821 or visit http://holmdelcommunityucc.com/

Next post preview: Getting Started: Extreme Couponing Light (Tells how to get started with extreme couponing without making yourself -- or your loved ones -- crazy.)

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