Review: Yet another MegaCouponing book
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 01 8, 2013
Like so many other books promising super savings on groceries, this one relies almost exclusively on couponing techniques that have been popularized on television and in magazine articles.Unfortunately, this megacouponing is impractical for most consumers, especially if your grocery purchases consist mostly of fresh foods rather than packaged, overly-processed foods and snacks and other junk foods. Using coupons may save you a few dollars on items such as paper goods or toiletries, but the claims of huge savings on your monthly grocery bills usually is not much more than hyperbole.The author stresses the use of coupons, stockpiling, and tracking sales cycles to buy at the low points of the price curve to maximize the projected savings. This involves a lot of researching grocery stores, searching coupon sites online, as well as tracking individual item categories plus the clipping, printing, and sorting of coupons. There are examples given of websites that help with this effort along with screen shots to illustrate how to use them with actual products and coupons. Ideas for where to find coupons are also discussed.To her credit, the author does mention buying products in season and offers up a chart from the USDA that gives a month-by-month listing of when specific fruits and vegetables are considered to be in-season for planning and price savings. She also offers a few basic tips on meal planning.Otherwise the bulk of the book is about couponing, price cycles, stockpiling, and ways to maximize the value of each coupon. Of course, this is all based on several assumptions: 1) that you can find coupons for items you actually will use; 2) your local stores have extremely liberal coupon redemption policies including doubling and even tripling the face value of the coupons and accept competitor's coupons; and 3) that you can find the coupon items in the specified sizes and quantities before the coupons expire.If you've got the time and effort to put into the process, then this book is for you. For me, instead of spending an inordinate amount of time and effort in chasing down a coupon and price cycle and store that allows me to purchase a $2.99 tube of toothpaste for 99 cents, I'll just buy the national brand of toothpaste that is always priced at 99 cents and use the saved time to save money in other ways.