I have been using coupons for about a month shy of a year now. During the first 3-4 months I spent hours googling for various information about using coupons and I had several only moderately successful coupon trips when I was getting started. Thankfully, I had found a helpful online community of couponers to encourage me to keep trying and help explain to me what to do different the next time.
In the past we would budget about $250 for groceries including household items like trash bags and body wash, and of course food. Now that I use coupons we have cut back to between $150-$175 a month and we are getting more food, and more name brands than we were in the past. So I definitely can tell you that using coupons really can work but for me it meant hours of research. If you’d rather waste less time and get straight to the good stuff, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Couponing is a great resource. I was hoping to learn a few tips and tricks that I didn’t already know but I only was able to pick up a few small nuggets of information. One thing I learned was that catalina machines are based on satellites , and because of that it’s best to not do coupon deals that require catalina coupons to print during 12-3am because the satellites are often down during those hours. While this isn’t necessarily a huge bit of information that will affect my shopping, it’s something I was surprised to learn. I consider myself to be quite knowledgeable about coupon usage so I can understand why there wasn’t much new information for me. I liked how each chapter included an “in this chapter” summary at the beginning and a “the least you should know” section at the end of each chapter. This makes it easy to quickly glance at the beginning or ending of a chapter to see if you’re interested in the chapter or if it will cover information you do or don’t already know.
If you are currently not at all familiar with coupons, or maybe you’re the “clip them each Sunday and spend them each Wednesday” type couponer then there is definitely TONS of information to be learned in this book. If terms like register rewards, filler item, stacking, etc are unfamiliar to you then this is a great book to pick up.
Given that there are now so many sources out there for coupon information, some of which discuss ways to use coupons unethically, I really appreciate that the complete idiot’s Guide to Couponing only covers ethical methods for using coupons and even warns readers about the ways that some people intentionally use coupons unethically or perhaps unintentionally do things like pick peelies off of products they aren’t buying – without even realizing that this is unethical.
Many of my friends and family members have caught on to my coupon usage and have asked me questions here and there about my methods but it’s a lot of information to just provide to someone without sitting down and having a couple hour discussion. I will definitely be passing this book on to some of them so that they can learn the coupon game.
Hi there! I am Emily Evert, the owner of Emily Reviews. I am 28 and live in a small town in Michigan with my boyfriend Ryan and our two pugs. I have a large family and I adore my nieces and nephews. I love reading memoirs, and learning about child development and psychology. I love watching The Game of Thrones, Teen Mom, Sister Wives and Veep. I like listening to Jason Isbell, John Prine, and other alt-country or Americana music. I created Emily Reviews as a creative outlet to share my life and the products that I love with others.
What was the “helpful online community” you mention in the first paragraph?
emmy
I was primarily referring to the coupon wizards (http://coupon-wizards.com/). They have a website/blog, active facebook page and used to do live webinars (basically online lectures – a guy would come on with a slideshow and discuss various topics that surround couponing – then at the end we could type in questions and he’d answer them). I believe that the webinars are now still available in a pre-recorded format that you can watch but I don’t think they’re doing the live webinars anymore. The site got really big really fast and they added on a lot of additional people to help out and it seems to me like they have kind of “sold out” as they post a lot of spammy type “deals” now :-/. Completely just my opinion of course. However, the recorded webinars should be well worth your time, I learned probably 75% of what I know from their webinars when I took them live.
However, there are also coupon forums like weusecoupons.com and afullcup.com that have a lot of users and you can go in and post questions. I’d suggest trying to learn 1 store at a time. If theres a certain store in your area that you want to check out see if there is a blog that focuses on that one store. I follow sites like iheartthemart (specializes in walmart deals) and meijermaddness.com (specializes in mejier deals) which is less confusing for me than following the blogs that cover tons of stores, most of which aren’t even in my state or whatever.
I also did a lot of google searches early on. If I wondered what a certain term meant or whether such-and-such store allowed stacking/doubling/etc I would just use google to find the answer.
Jessica A
My favorite is the Sign Language 101: Basic phrases.
emmy
Jessica A 
What was the “helpful online community” you mention in the first paragraph?