So far, you have your coupons and they’re all organized, right?  Now what do you do with them?

First, let’s take care of a couple of misconceptions about saving money with coupons:

• All you have to do is buy the items you have coupons for. In my journeys around the frugal blogosphere, I’ve heard of beginners jumping in and just buying every item they have a coupon for.  Believe me, that is not going to save you any money!  You have to be selective about exactly what coupons you’re going to use and, more importantly, WHEN!
• Generic is almost always cheaper. If you’re like me, you probably normally buy the generic brand of an item because it’s less expensive.  There are very rarely any coupons for any generic items, so you might think that using coupons won’t save you any money because you’ll be buying the more expensive items.  But if you do this right, you’ll be paying less for the brand name items than you would for the generic ones!

The only way you’re ever going to save a substantial amount of money is by matching sales with your coupons.  Nearly every grocery store puts out a store flyer each week with the sales they’re running.  What you need to do is look at the sale items and see which ones you have coupons for.  By using a coupon on an item that’s already on sale, you save bundles of money!  I typically get brand name items for far less than I would have paid for the generic ones!

By the way, this is one reason why the spreadsheet system of organizing coupons works so well.  To check to see if you have coupons for a sale item, you can just look in your spreadsheet (which Excel can alphabetize for you), instead of sifting through loads of coupons in an envelope!

When you’re first starting out, there are many blogs out there (most of the ones on my blogroll, for instance) that do the matching for specific stores for you!  You can just look at the list of deals and decide which ones you want to take advantage of.  Here on Screaming Pennies, I’m going to start doing deal match-ups for Dillon’s, Walmart, CVS, and Walgreens every week (I hope!).  If you want to find someone who matches sales with coupons for your local stores, you can probably find it by googling the name of the store and “coupons” or “deals”.

Just remember that this takes practice and that’s why using other people’s deal match-ups in the beginning is so helpful.  I don’t think I would have found very many deals at all if I was trying to do it all myself in the beginning.  But before you know it, you’ll be a pro and you’ll be saving tons of money!

Did you find this post helpful? Please consider subscribing in a reader or by Email! Get all the coupon alerts, deal scenarios and money-saving tips delivered straight to you!