Coupons on Shine

Slash your grocery bill in half

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By Susan Samtur

Last month, I paid just 42¢ for $211 worth of groceries. Yup, you read that right. In fact, I save around 65 percent every time I shop, and if I really play my cards right, more than 90 percent. Over the course of the year, this adds up to about $5,000 in savings. What’s my secret? My foolproof SuperShopping System. It’s served me so well over the years that I’m known as “The Coupon Queen,” and I’ve written three books about it. (My latest one, Cashing In at the Checkout in the Digital Age, will be out next year.) Now I want to share some of my best tips with you. Once you’ve taken a virtual walk through the grocery aisles with me, you’ll be on your way to saving hundreds too.

Getting Ready to Hit the Store
A small amount of preparation goes a long way toward ka-ching!

Coupons are cool again

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Goodness knows we like to debate whether we really can save money using coupons here on Shine. But whether you're a coupon pro or you only cut out a few coupons for the products you always buy, you've got lots of company. Coupon use is definitely up for the first time since the early 1990s, thanks ever so much to a these short-on-money-and-jobs times.

Can you really save money with coupons?

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I started clipping coupons when I was a dirt-poor college student, having to decide whether to spend an extra 60 cents on a couple of packages of Ramen noodles or use that money for bus fare to get to work. (Sounds terribly dramatic, but it's true. It was Syracuse, N.Y., and it was worth going without dinner in order to avoid a three-mile walk home in the snow at night). Back then, the quarters I scraped together went a long way -- a couple of coupons could yield savings equal to the amount needed to wash a load of laundry -- and so the sorting and clipping was definitely worth my time.

I still clip coupons, but now it's more an exercise in frugality, as well as a challenge to see how little I can pay for the things I usually buy anyway. Every once in a while I hit a jackpot -- a buy-one-get-one free item for which I have coupons, for instance -- and I find myself wondering: What if I did this all the time? Can you really save that much money with coupons?

Kathy Spencer says yes. And she can help teach you how.

The Boxford, Massachusetts mom spends less than $10 a week to feed her family of six -- plus several pets.