Here is the article that momtoabunch posted. Quote:
Let’s face it: with gasoline prices hovering around $3 per gallon, almost all of us are paying as much as $40 to $50 per fill up at the gas station. Add that cost to rising prices for many other goods and services, and we are all searching for additional ways to stretch every dollar to pay for the range of things we need each day, week and month. It’s a tough challenge. There is, however, a time-proven method to combine the discounting power of coupons, sales, and rebates over the long term to free up some much needed cash.
This practice is referred to as “stockpiling.” Finding the super deal and then buying not one or two, but as many as you can at the super deal price. This requires you to have as many coupons as possible for every item at any given time (and hence, a “wish list” of coupons). Then corner the market, and store them away. Create your own warehouse in your home and you are no longer depending on the store to give you a great price. You can wait it out, until another super deal comes along.
Super savers have at least a three months supply of basic items, from toothpaste and shampoo to pasta and rice. Ten tubes of toothpaste, purchased at 0 – 50 cents a tube during a sale/coupon/rebate, is ten tubes of toothpaste you are not going to pay $4 each for a month from now. That’s $35 – 40 of savings on one item alone…multiply that by the number of tubes your family uses a year, and you can begin to identify the potential savings.
Many sites, and self-proclaimed super savers, will tell you that this works, and that they pay virtually nothing for groceries. This is likely true.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to do the math. I can, however, give you a very personal analysis, and experience, from my own rocket scientist husband’s life.
His analysis:
18 years ago, Flash and I finished our post graduate work and internships to take professional jobs. On the up side, our new home was in San Diego, California - a really beautiful place. On the down side, the salaries for assistant professors and corporate scientists are amazingly low, and the cost of living in San Diego was higher than other areas. San Diego even had a “snack tax!” We had the usual bills: monthly rent, food, utilities, telephone service, gasoline, insurance for the car, and, of course, the start-up costs of professional clothing, furniture, a lawn mower… We weren’t high flyers or big spenders, but even so, fitting all of the costs into our monthly budget wasn’t possible. We were able to save more as students than as professionals. We were rapidly draining our savings.
It wasn’t that we weren’t trying to reduce our grocery bills. Competition between stores was fierce, and there were regular loss leaders at three major stores seeking to claim our food budget. By shopping at each store for only major sale items, and using coupons, there were times when we could literally walk out of the store with groceries and cash back. The store policies placed no limits on the total value that the coupons could add up to: in other words, if the normal cost of all the items was $50, and the sale discounts and coupons added up to a savings of $60, the store cashier would literally hand us $10 dollars and our groceries (note from Flash – this is referred to as “overage”) The problem was that not all of the items we needed each week were on sale.
The solution was to build up a collection of food items and cleaning products in sufficient amounts to let us purchase those items only when they were on sale and we had coupons. We looked around the house, and started tracking the sales Flash found. It turned out that within any 3 month period, virtually everything we purchased at the supermarket would be on sale, typically at a loss for the store. Naturally there were a few items that couldn’t be stockpiled this way, namely fresh fruits, vegetables and milk, but that wouldn’t deduct much from our savings over the long run.
So, with very little extra cash, we needed to figure out how to stockpile 3 months worth of food and cleaning products if we were going to really start cutting these costs down. First things first: where were we going to put all this stuff? We had a tiny house, no pantry, attic, or basement. We were going to have to acquire or make the storage space ourselves.
To figure our storage requirements, we sat down together for a few hours and created a detailed list of the groceries and supplies we typically bought and the quantities we used on a weekly or monthly basis. Once we had determined the quantities of items and the rough sizes of the containers they were packaged in, I bought enough half-inch thick exterior plywood and nails to build a stockpile cabinet that could hold 3 months worth of the items on our list. It was cheap, less than $40, quick to build, and ended up providing more than enough space. We’ve used that cabinet ever since.
For frozen goods, we needed a decent size freezer. Being cash poor, we relied on the time honored tradition of hand-me-downs. Flash’s parents had a large upright freezer that they wanted to replace, so we got it for nothing more than the effort to move it from their place to ours. It was about 15 years old at the time, but it was still in good working condition and had just the right amount of storage space to meet our needs. It served us well for another 15 years. We replaced it two years ago.
Everything was in place to begin the process of stockpiling to save money. We built up the three month supply of food items (canned, prepackaged, and frozen) and cleaning supplies slowly, always trying to buy items on sale and with coupons whenever possible, for the lowest possible cost.
From a savings perspective, we weren’t able to save as much as we would have liked during this initial phase of building up our stockpile (typically 15% to 30%), but that didn’t stop us because the financial math was just too persuasive to be ignored. Once we had our stockpile in place, we only shopped sales with coupons, and routinely achieve savings of 50% to 80% on each shopping trip. We have been practicing this whenever possible, and our annual savings have consistently been in the range of $1,000 to $10,000.
Perhaps you are thinking that this sounds like just too much work to get started. I have to admit that it did to me 18 years ago. Let me ask you to look at it this way:
1) Estimate the total amount you spend in the supermarket each year;
2) Take 35% to 50% of that total as savings that can be easily achieved by stockpiling and using sales and coupons; and
3) Calculate how many times you can fill up your cars gas tank at a price of $3 per gallon using the money you would save at the supermarket.
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07-08-2008, 09:25 AM
That is so true. Hoarders also don't share their deals that they find with others because they want it all to themselves.
