The Money Motivator

This may be a lame post compared to the video above, but I needed an excuse to embed it in my blog. Any time a cool video explains research that challenges our commonly held assumptions comes out, it deserves a place in the Assumption Blanket. Plus, I think our motivations for clipping coupons fits well with the research. We do a basic task, we get rewarded for it, so we do more.

As for our rewards, I play catch-up with this post a bit. In April, we averaged 24.10% over 6 grocery trips for a total savings of $124.49. In May, we made 7 trips, averaging 30.47% savings from coupons, for a grand total of $224.63. That brings my running total to $853.10 for the first 5 months of the year. Talk about surprises - that's "The Truth!"

Marching down the savings

I don't know what's more fun: Entering crazy numbers into an Excel spreadsheet or finding weird pictures to use in my Grocery Coupon Challenge. But one thing I DO know is my wife the Grocery Coupon Queen is dropping the bills like Aaron Burr dropped Alexander Hamilton. And yet, she's saving a bunch of Hamiltons at the same time! Oh, the irony. Our March savings with coupons: 30.39% of our total grocery bill, or a whopping $258.83. That brings us to a savings of $503.98 after three months. If I keep on my bookkeeping roll, I should be able to report April too, which saw us busy with the tax man and a garage sale. Good times!

37.56% in February 2010! Holy...

OK, so I know I'm behind a month in posting our results of our "Grocery Coupon Challenge" (which is what I'm calling it this week). But we lost a receipt so I got all flustered. But whatever, in February we saved an average of 37.56% and a total of $92.16, and that's with one Rainbow receipt missing. That brings our running total to $245.15. And that's no April Fool's Day Joke!

Tallying up the Coup's

OK, so I think I finally found a purpose for posting regularly on my otherwise completely useless blog: tallying up the awesome savings my illustrious spouse achieves by clipping and using coupons. She's been kicking so much grocery-chain rear lately, we decided to track it and total it up, just to satisfy our own curiosity.

Then I thought, "Why not broadcast it to the world?" (Or in this case, to my 3.6 readers.) It seems like folks at FiLife are always asking how much someone can really save by clipping coupons. Well, I figured I could provide an example for one family for one year. You'll have to take us for our word, but I don't have much incentive to overblow it. Here's the ground rules:

• My wife keeps her regular coupon-clipping routine: about an hour a week, mostly out of the Sunday paper circulars or what junk mailers send us. We don't have luck with printers, so we don't hunt for them online (sorry).


• We only count our three regular grocery destinations: Target, Cub Foods, and Rainbow Foods. No Dollar Store, Savers, or other places where beef jerky is prominently displayed.


• We trust whatever the store tells us on the receipt that we "saved" in dollars at the bottom of the receipt. This will count in-store specials and stuff, which might over-estimate our total, but I figure that's balanced out by skipping the smaller stores where we sometimes shop.

I'll post the results for each month here, although there will be a slight delay. The results for January, 2010: an average savings of 29% of the bill for a total of $152.99. Seriously.

Do I have an incredible wife, or what? The only downside to this that I can see is she'll want half the money back in spa treatments, and I'll have already spent it on Summit Horizon Red.