I have discovered so many sites that have such great information that it boggles my mind. When I advised to join all of the coupon groups on Facebook, I didn't realize that not everyone had a Facebook account, so for those who don't have an account, don't fret. I will be posting many links to websites that you can join just by having an email account. Remember, make sure that you make a seperate account for all your couponing activity. I would suggest a gmail account. There are so many coupon sites, message boards/forums as well as just frugal living sites that it's almost impossible to count. I will give them to you as I find them and hopefully you won't get too overwhelmed.
Message boards/forums are really great because they connect you with other people who have the experience to give advice and find the great websites where others have done the leg work of finding the coupons, store match ups, coupon policy changes, apps for smart phones and the list goes on. One that I found today that is very informative, is www.hotcouponworld.com They have a great post about how to get started step by step and they do a much better job than I can do. I have found that almost everyone who has a website about coupons and couponing, begin in a different way than the next person. Sometimes it's a lot of fun, but at the same time it can be confusing. I am learning by trial and error and I told my son this evening that learning how to coupon in the most efficient way is like taking college classes. If you want to be successful you have to educate yourself as much as possible. Couponing can also be like a full time job since offers, free items and store specials are ever changing. Another reason why couponing can be considered a job, is that you can actually MAKE money while saving money. This statement leads to my next paragraph and how I got my husband completely on board with extreme couponing.
It's funny how once I got started with couponing, how fast it's really become an obsession. My husband had been so confused about the whole "extreme" couponing craze. We have always tried to use coupons as much as possible, but to him, it was like getting the Sunday paper, cutting out the coupons that we knew we would use and then pitching the rest in the trash. In the past few weeks, when I decided to go hard on couponing, I had gotten coupon inserts from Ebay. He was sitting at the kitchen table with his scissors in hand and his little 5 page insert ready to start snipping. I pulled out my stash of 30 5 page inserts, plopped them down in front of him and said, "We need to cut every coupon out." He looked at me with the deer in the headlights look and asked, "Do you mean ALL of them?!" I then explained about how we could actually make money on some of items and he was all for it! Those scissors flew until his hand cramped up several times. So, the free and money maker coupons are what gets those coupon extremist's grocery bills that total $800 all the way down to $25!
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