What I have learned...

I'm new to this whole saving money as a rule thing, and having read a TON of saving blogs, I have come to a few conclusions. You have to spend money to FULLY benefit from the various sales and ESPECIALLY the CVS game...which I am very interested in becoming proficient at. I am new to an area that actually has CVS and I have been watching all the CVS related blogs.

So it turns out that the "beginner's suggestions, while VERY beneficial ALSO required you to have been receiving the Sunday paper, presumably to get the coupons to save money, months prior to the time the CVS deal came into place. Which brings me to the first thing i have learned:

1. Online coupons alone just don't cut it.

You definitely need to get the Sunday paper to get those coupons that will be important weeks or months down the road. It doesn't work to just start up and expect to get the same deals all the others are getting, because you need to have been getting the coupons (and saving them) for months, in some cases. For instance; The CVS deal that is all the rage right now involves the Contour Meter @ $14.99 which has the ability to earn you 14.99 in ECB (easy care bucks). So you have the opportunity to get the Contour Meter for free! Great right? Well even better would be not having to spend the 14.99 in the first place OOP (out of pocket) and STILL get the ECBs. Well guess what, if you had been doing this before just now and had been getting the Sunday paper way back in 3-16 you MIGHT have had the coupon for the Contour Meter for $30/1 and since CVS apparently brings that coupon down to 14.99/1 you would only spend 1 dollar and you'd get 14.99 back in ECBs. Notice I said, MIGHT have this coupon...which brings me to the next thing I learned:

2. NOTHING is useless.

Let's say I HAD been doing the savings stuff earlier on and gotten the paper on that fateful Sunday in March. Now I did the coupon clipping not once but twice previously. I cut out the coupons and place them into two categories: Stuff I need (cereal, bread, cheese, the things that are devoured in my house) and Stuff I may decide to get but don't necessarily NEED (extra toothpaste, toothbrushes, paper towels, diapers, chocolate, stockup stuff. Ok so I NEED chocolate, but this is the extra stuff I don't normally buy). The rest go straight into the trash. I am a horrible pack rat. So now that I have laid down the law with coupons, if it doesn't fit in those two categories it gets thrown away, no ifs ands or buts (cuz believe me I'd find some), why on EARTH would I have hung onto a Glucose checker when I am not diabetic? I need to take EVERY opportunity that I have to throw things away and not ask myself, "Do I REALLY have no chance of ever wanting this? I don't want it to come back and be needed later." I stopped asking that question because it took far too much time out of WAY too much time already spent figuring out the first two categories, and of course I also need to go back over each and every single one and write the date of the paper it was found in on it. I found out that one the hard way. Which brings me to the next thing I learned:

3. Organization is NOT an option!

In each of the MANY sites of far more experienced savers than myself there is a method of determining which sales are at which stores and which coupon from which date will allow you to best benefit from that particular sale. I started with http://www.grocerygame.com. I started out just picking up the Sunday paper from vendors but that turned out to be a waste of time as oftentimes the paper would be LONG gone by the time I went out to get it, and no WAY was I getting up and out the door before 9am on a Sunday! So I opted to get it delivered. Would you believe that you STILL have to get up fairly early or Sunday papers will "walk" away from your driveway??? That's another something I learned, but it could just be my bad luck so not worth it's own number. Once I got the paper acquiring factor taken care of and clipped my coupons I discovered the hard way that once you remove the coupons from it's paper, you no longer have any indication which date it came on. So always make sure you date each and every one.

Now let's go back to the CVS coupon for the Contour Meter. So we've established that I can't throw ANYTHING away after all because you never know when that useless coupon might come in handy. So what do you do now? Well I decided to go all out in the hopes that my efforts to save money won't COST me more in money and time then I could ever possibly save. I wanted something that could hold the coupons in a clear pocket or sleeve so that the coupons that didn't fall into the previous two categories could be set aside one in each pocket (unless of course there are duplicate coupons for the same item). I started out looking for photo album pages but that proved costly and ineffective for what I wanted to accomplish. Finally I typed in "coupon organizers" into Google and I learned something else.

4. If you thought of it, chances are someone else has as well, and marketed it.

For the obsessive, neurotic person like me who needs the PERFECT coupon organizing system, it's out there, in many many different forms. If you don't know which one is best for you go here first http://tipnut.com/coupon-organizer-system/ I had previously done the coupon organizer in it's basic form, an accordion style little pouch. http://www.crgibson.com/default.aspx?page=2&categoryid=9&subcategoryid=54&subsubcategoryid=54&productid=qco-3714
there is also a slightly different style available here http://www.organize-it-online.com/itm_couponorg.html?cmpid=froogle It does the job if you are just bringing a few coupons to the store and don't have a bunch of categories or stores you are using them for. For me, I had my two categories and then my 3 grocery stores and if I was going shopping I moved the appropriate coupon to the store I was going to visit that day. At any rate, the coupon organizer worked OK for what I was doing at the time, but now I strive to be one of those 40 or less a week grocery shoppers and coming down from what I used to spend a week this is going to take some REAL work! So I kept looking and came across the following sites. http://www.momsaves.com/buildityourself.html has a wonderful site that shows you step by step how to do EXACTLY what it was I am planning to do. On the other hand if you can't get beyond your perfectionism and need a tried and true guaranteed organizing system you can go here http://mrsascouponorganizer.com/. As for me I ordered the clear vinyl pockets mentioned in the do it yourself site and I am hoping that I can do this myself. If not there is always Mrs. A's to fall back on. Whatever your system, I suggest that you have a section for individual stores as one thing the grocery game DID teach me was to get rain checks every chance you can. Which brings me to another thing I have learned and the last in this post:

5. If you never ask, you'll never know.

Always get rain checks. When dealing with an unbelievable deal, the items have often been picked clean from all the other savers getting there before you. Most stores will give you rain checks and the best part is, they will usually let YOU decide how many of the item you had wanted to get and thus you can get more at the discounted price than maybe you would have gotten the first time around. If you can't find an item ask someone to find it for you. This proved incredibly beneficial today as I faced a too good to be true ad that was so confusing it took two store associates to clarify and confirm that it was in fact just that good a deal. Of course in the end it WAS too good to be true, because the particular item that was an option in the ad wasn't actually IN the store. I confirmed this with the store manager who informed me that his store didn't actually carry the item. He did, however offer to call the distribution center and find out if they ever would carry it. He came back and informed me that it was a brand new product and that the distribution center would be shipping all possible variations of the item and they would be in his store available for the previously mentioned deal by Saturday!

For those of you who are curious, the store in question is my local Albertsons and the deal I am referring to was 10/10 powerade 32 oz or their new flavored water powerade zero (a revamp of the powerade options I am told) followed by an additional 5 free if you buy all 10 of them! After my adventures there this morning you can bet I will be back for that deal, and probably many times after that, their customer service is far better than I have ever seen anywhere else!