We are a family of seven. That’s a little bit larger than your average family. We also are a family of seven living on one income. Even though I don’t have a “paying job”, I do see it as my job to stretch our income for our family as much as possible.
Back when I was doing a Tightwad Gazette challenge, (which I plan to get back on now that life is slowing down a bit) I talked about how one of the largest areas that I could save money was in the grocery section of our budget.
However, I’m sure you’ve noticed that food prices are on the rise due to gas prices. It has gotten harder and harder to save money on food. So now I’ve added saving money on non-food items such as our toiletries and household needs as well.
And just how have I been doing that?
Well, I have been receiving the Sunday paper for about a year now and with it…many, many coupons. And I’ve been saving them and thinking to myself:
I’m sure most of these coupons are for things I don’t use.
I don’t like to feed my family many processed foods and that’s what most coupons are for.
I don’t see how one coupon here and one coupon there will save us any money.
But finally, I decided to look at those coupons and see what was in there and you know what…
I did use some of those items on the coupons.
Not all of the foods were for processed junk.
And these coupons combined with weekly sales (which I all ready used) would save our family some money.
So I took the plunge. And do you see those items in that picture above? There are 2 liquid laundry detergents, 3 dish detergents, and four toothpastes. I got those for a total of $ 9.32. And considering that one of the detergents alone costs over $7.00 and we saved over $30.00 for these items, I call that a good deal! (These were purchased at Walgreens.)
This savings on non-food items as well as the savings from using coupons at the grocery store matched with the sales ads has been helping our family to live large on one income! {more to come}
For some information on couponing, here are some great places to visit:
There are many, many more but I’ll leave you with those to get you started!
