Closet Couponing

It's time to be real here. I have a secret addiction. Actually, if you have looked at my Facebook in the last month you will have noticed a suspicious number of things that I have "liked" that are things I would never normally like...like Oscar Mayer hotdogs, Uncle Ben's Rice, etc. Dave is really worried that I will accidentally not realize that he is signed off of his account and therefore have him "like" Venus for Women or something like that.

Anyway, I have become a couponer! Or, at least I really want to be one. I have tried really hard to learn more about it lately and I feel like there are some good deals (we also call them "dills" in honor of our Utah home. You have to wait till things are on sell to get the best dills) out there just waiting to be found. You just have to know where to look and how to go about it. So, in honor of my new addiction, and because I am so qualified, here are my top tips for new couponers:

1. You kind of have to change your attitude about shopping. Before, I would make a shopping list, think of what I needed, and then get really mad when there weren't coupons floating around for what I needed. I then realized that you have to bide your time, wait until you can combine a coupon with a sale, and then stock up one what you need. That is how I ended up with 8 boxes of cereal on my laundry shelves. But I got them for a fifth of the price! (that was one of my happiest deals to date)

2. You might have to get lost out in scary grain fields looking for a recycling center. Provo has curbside recycling so it is kind of hard to find newspaper bins just anywhere, and I wanted to look for coupons that people had thrown away. I accidentally ended up at this crazy compost center way out in the boonies of Provo:

Amber waves of grain right there. I think this was actually a place for people to bring their logs and dead farm animals. Not a coupon in sight.

3. When you do find coupons, you must absolutely be willing to dumpster dive a little. Sacrifice the body. I found a bin at our local Smith's and used my snow scraper in my car to dig through since I was not tall enough to really reach. Sure, I smacked my head on the top of the bin, but was it worth it? Definitely.

 The plastic bags were brought along as a decoy to recycle. However, I didn't end up finding a place to recycle them so there they still sit in my car.

4. Don't buy things that you don't really want in the first place! If you could see the terrible quality picture below, you would see that there were a few suspicious purchases but most of my most recent haul were things that I really needed and would use. The one exception was the three bags of sweet potato fries, but I totally love those things and I most definitely would have just made them with a raw potato but this was just as cheap! I did catch myself trying to buy these weird Ritz Crackerfuls things, because they were only $.60, but then I realized that they looked a little barfy and I really didn't want them in the first place.

The oatmeal, pens, floss and conditioner were free :)

5. Sacrifice everything for free food. Dignity, time, whatever. It will be worth it. And when you are too late for National Free Slurpee Day at 7/11, try not to be too sad:

Poor little guy. 

Coupon in peace, my friends.