Grocery Coupon Resources That Make Saving Money Easy

Photo courtesy of Flickr user sdc2027

Coupons have been a favorite way to save money on groceries for generations. Clipping coupons is often cited as one of many ways to save money on living expenses, particularly on groceries, which no household can go without buying.

Coupons, frequently bundled in the local newspaper, have been an advantageous marketing method of companies looking to promote new products or build brand awareness. As the Internet has grown in popularity and new technology has become available, coupons have become available in more ways and forms.

Here are several web sites that will help you save money on your groceries with minimal effort, right from your computer.

Free Printable Coupons

Even if you do not get the Sunday paper each week, you can get hundreds of dollars of coupons by getting printable coupons off the internet. Here are the biggest legitimate free coupon sites:

• Coupons.com
• Smart Source
• Red Plum
• CoolSavings.com

Red Plum and Smart Source might sound familiar – that is because they are the companies that print and distribute the coupons in the Sunday newspaper. The selection will typically be different between the newspaper insert and the online coupon offerings.

You should also check with your local grocery store’s website, as many have implemented “clip-free” coupons tied to their loyalty programs. These sometimes work on store brands – cheaper alternatives to name-brand products that seldom if ever offer coupon savings.

Another source for free coupons – that is, ones that you do not have to buy a newspaper to obtain – is to subscribe to promotional emails from your favorite grocery brands. Almost all of them offer coupons by email or on special promotional pages.

Coupon Organizing

For as long as I can remember, I recall my mom using a little accordion file organizer or a little file box with index card dividers to sort coupons by type and expiration date. Official “coupon organizer” products have been made for years to capitalize on people who save money on their grocery shopping by cutting out and saving all those coupons.

Despite all the advances in technology, coupon organizing is still a hassle and very likely the most time-consuming part of couponing. However, thanks to the sharing of techniques around the internet, several innovative methods have surfaced and have become popular.

One method is to use a binder. You can use either a school or office document binder or a plain old report binder, then fill it with business card or trading card sleeve pages. These plastic pages have many pockets on each page. Typically these would be used to sort baseball cards, but they work to store all those little paper coupons as well.

The filing box or accordion file is still used as well. Couponing101 has a series of posts on the various methods for sorting coupons. Each post offers examples and a discussion of the positive and negative aspects of each method.

One rather new method of organizing coupons that has become valuable in the Internet age is to leave them unclipped! Why is this method more high-tech? That has to do with the next topic below.

Coupon Schedules and Deal Matchups

These resources have only just become a huge boon to couponers around the country, as they can organize and share information and take hours off the couponing process.

Twenty or more years ago, to make the best use of your coupons, you would have to check your local grocery store ad each week and see what products were on sale, and what coupons you had. When you found a match, hooray! That item got added to the shopping list and the coupon paper-clipped to the list. It also helped to have a notebook of your store’s regular price on the items you bought most often so you could watch for price drops, and compare a coupon’s value on the major brand versus the store brand alternative’s price.

Sound like a lot of work? Well it got worse if you lived in a major metropolitan area with multiple grocery store chains in town. Each one had its own pricing schedule. It was quite possible to spend more time clipping, sorting, and planning the use of your coupons than it was worth in the savings.

Now, deal matchups and coupon schedules – even previews – can be found from coupon information sites on the Internet.

These sites provide information on particularly hot deals by checking the grocery chain ads, plus using their knowledge of available printable coupons and past coupon inserts in newspapers.

Here’s a fictional example of a grocery matchup deal:

Grandma’s Corner Grocery store is having a sale on Sugar Cookie Cereal, for $2.50 a box. Combine this with the $1 off coupon from the 2/2 newspaper insert coupon and the printable coupon for $1.50 from coupons.com to get a box for FREE!

It is not unusual to see deals that reduce your cost to nothing or even save you more off the product than it costs! Having your coupons left unclipped in their inserts can help you locate a particular coupon quickly.

SundayCouponPreview.com is a very useful site. Just as the title says, they provide previews of coupons coming to your Sunday paper. They also post about free printable coupons you may have missed. Their previous posts are helpful for knowing what coupons are in what insert from what date. 

Here are just a few of the many sites that provide deals and matchups. Find one that matches your style and tracks the chains that are local to you:

• The Krazy Coupon Lady
• Coupon Connection
• CuckooForCouponDeals.com

Coupon Forums

Finally, it is a good idea to be part of a community of couponers where you can learn from others, ask questions, share your stories, and brag about your savings!

Most major deal sites will have a grocery forum, but you can also try these communities dedicated to using coupons to save money:

• Hot Coupon World
• We Use Coupons
• A Full Cup

What are your favorite grocery coupon resources? Share them in the comments below.