Couponing for the Rest of Us - A Review

About the book (from Amazon):
Not everyone is an extreme couponer. Most of us just want to save some money--not let clipping coupons and scouring the internet for deals take over our lives. For all the savvy shoppers out there, Kasey Knight Trenum has written Couponing for the Rest of Us.

She knows that money is tight, food prices are going up, gas prices are closing in on unbearable, and people have better things to do than spend every spare minute (if they have any) obsessing over costs and coupons. She also knows coupons just happen to be a tool that can save a family hundreds of dollars every month and ultimately improve a family's finances and its future.

Couponing for the Rest of Us shows readers

•where to find coupons for what your family eats
•how to make the internet do the work for you
•how to find sale cycles and store match-ups (and what those terms mean!)
•how to reinvent your shopping strategy and toss your lists
•how to make grocery shopping less stressful--even fun!
•how to turn money saved into money shared
•and much more

If readers want to save money and time, this book is a gold mine.

My thoughts:
I love to save money. I'm not a true bargain shopper in the way that my aunt can find the 90% off racks at the major department stores and have a coupon to go with it. I'm not one of those grocery shoppers who hunt through the sale ads for the stores and will show up at the store with all of the sale ads for price matching. I'm just not. I've tried to be, but it's not me. I've used coupons in the past and even still use them. But I don't have any sort of system, and I certainly don't pay attention to the sales! But I want to be able to save money on my weekly grocery bill.

So I picked up this book. Let me say that I love the easy to read way that the book is written. It feels that I'm sitting down with the author and having a conversation with her. I've learned that even using one or two coupons is money that you've saved and is in your pocket and not the store's cash register. One of the things that really stood out to me while reading this book was that she talked of the 12 week sale cycles that the stores have. I never knew that before. Or at least I never paid attention to them. So after reading that, I started to think of the items I buy on a weekly basis (milk, slim fast, frozen foods, etc) and the items that I buy at least once a month - though most are twice a month - (cat food, kleenex, kitty litter, toothpaste, etc). I'm going to try one of the things that she suggests and that's to track the price of an item for the twelve week cycle. I just bought a bag of cat food, so it wasn't on sale and I didn't have a coupon for it. It cost me $3.48 for it. So over the next 12 weeks while I figure out how much food my cat eats in a month, I'm going to watch the price of her brand of cat food and see if I can figure out when in the 12 week period it goes on sale. So that when it does, I'll pick up more than just the one bag and slowly begin to stock pile and reduce my weekly grocery bill.

There are TONS of useful tips in the book. And there's even an appendix that has "coupon" lingo in it so that I could understand the difference between a store sale and a manufacturer's coupon and all the parts of a coupon. The author even has a website that has taken all of the guesswork out of the way for you and has done all of the leg work telling of the best deals and there's a database with coupons that can be printed out. I've not spent a lot of time browsing there, but I've bookmarked it. Her website is Time2SaveWorkshops . I highly recommend checking it out.

I received this book for free from the publisher, Revell Books, for the purpose of reviewing. My thoughts and opinions are my own.

 Recommended to people who want to save money, bargain shoppers, Dave Ramsey fans, those on a budget, couponers, moms, and busy people.

Available May 2013 at your local bookstore from Revell Books, a division of Baker Publishing Group.

Rating - 4.5 stars (only because I'm still reading it!), so for Amazon purposes, it'll be 4 stars.

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