O.P.E.S. (Part 5): Briefing On Savings

Be staying organized, prepared, and efficient while shopping, you should see your weekly savings increase as you become more experienced using coupons and finding deals. I would also suggest, if you don't already, to keep track of the money you save. Seeing your savings written down and watching it add up every week is a great way to stay motivated to keep couponing. Financially, having your savings recorded will help you to stay on budget by seeing exactly where your money is going, allowing you to set higher savings goals for yourself when you become an experienced coupon user.

To help you keep track of your savings, I've added a new spreadsheet available to you entitled "Savings Made Easy." I did not create this sheet myself and do no take credit for it, however I wanted to share it with you as it's a wonderful tool. This spreadsheet allows you to keep track of how much you save on a monthly basis. It also includes a rebates tracker to help you to keep track of all the rebates you've submitted and received or are currently waiting on. Please feel free to download this as well if you feel you could benefit from it. You can find it located on my download page and is available in ods (Open Office) or xls (Excel) formats. 

O.P.E.S. (Part 4): Briefing On Efficiency

Being efficient is a great way to reduce daily stress, allowing you to achieve a high rate of productivity with less time spent doing a task. A great way to increase efficiency is to improve both improve organization and preparation techniques. If you have those two techniques down pat, being efficient will naturally fall into place.   As I like to say, "work smart, not hard." Today I will discuss a few more techniques I hope will help give ideas to increase your own efficiency.

1. Shop when the stores are less crowded. I love to shop on the weekday around 10am. This time at least for me, my No Frills is practically empty. This reduces the stress of fighting the crowds allowing for more concentration which will lead to more efficient and faster shopping. In addition, because they don't have a line up at their register, the cashiers are also less stressed and more willing to help. Making the chances of having any issues about a coupon or a price match decrease.

2. Take advantage of price matching. Almost every grocery store price matches against competitor ads. This allows you the coupon user a way to "have your cake and eat it too". In the end, this saves you both time and gas, allowing you to get all your deals at one store by using other store flyers to get the better deals. The only catch with price matching is usually a bit of hassle. However, as I've shared in my earlier posts please feel free to view my download page to download a price match data spreadsheet. Using the spreadsheet will take take the hassle out of price matching, allowing you to increase your savings, adding to the amount you already saved by using coupons. 

3. Spend less time searching on Google with these tips to produce faster results. Ever search for something only to end up an hour later with nothing but stress and still no results? These few pointers can be used to search for anything on Google more efficiently. But for todays examples they will be geared to finding coupons and shopping deals online.

Either/orGoogle normally searches for pages that contain all the words you type in the search box, but if you want pages that have one term or another (or both), use the OR operator -- or use the "|" symbol (pipe symbol) to save you [coupon | code | gillette]

Quotes
If you want to search for an exact phrase, use quotes. ["charmin printable coupon"] will only find that exact phrase. [charmin "printable coupon"] will find pages that contain the word charmin and the exact phrase "printable coupon."

Not
If you don't want a term or phrase, use the "-" symbol. [-expired coupon codes] will return pages that contain "coupon" and "codes" but that don't contain "expired."

Including

If you want to include all words in a search, use the "+" symbol. [coupons +codes +gillette] will return pages that contain  "coupon" "codes" and "gillette."

File types
If you just want to search for .PDF files, or Word documents, or Excel spreadsheets, for example, use the "filetype:" operator. For example I will search: ["coupon policy" filetype:pdf]. This will give me a result of every PDF file available that includes the phrase "coupon policy."

Site-specific
Use the "site:" operator to search only within a certain website. [site:smartcanucks.ca coupons] will search for the term "coupons" only within this site. The "site:" operator can also be used to search within a specific domain such as [site:.ca coupons] This will give me a result of all sites that end in .ca and also contain "coupons."

O.P.E.S. (Part 3): Briefing On Preparation

Preparation is also extremely important if you want to successfully save money shopping. A great way to begin is by writing a list of things you will need for the week and a budget of what you are looking to spend. It's also good idea to review your initial list asking yourself regrading each item whether this something you need right now or can it wait. A general rule of thumb to follow is to only buy non-necessity items when they are on sale and it's a great deal. By doing this you're not only saving yourself more money in the end you're also sharpening your skills at finding great deals in the future.    

Now it's time to begin racking up the savings by going through the store flyers and gathering all the coupons that pertain to the items you wish to purchase.  Unless an item is on sale for a great deal or a necessity that you just remembered you needed, try to make sure you don't add anything else to your list other than what's on the list already. This will simply add to your overall cost and decrease your savings defeating the purpose of saving money entirely. 

To help me with this, I've created a shopping list calculator on excel. It allows me to know exactly what I need to buy regarding the size and price of the items, preventing purchasing the wrong item. It also allows you to account for coupons by  automatically calculating the price based on the quantity minus the value of any coupons you use. It doesn't include taxes, but it's wonderful for when you're on a budget by letting you know exactly how much you're looking to spend/save. I just print it out when I'm done and it helps me stay on track in the store. 

Here's an sample of what it looks like below. If you would like to use this spreadsheet for your own use, visit my download page to download it in either ods (Open Office) or xls (Excel). For easy editing all you have to edit are the categories that are in green or black, the red categories will automatically adjust accordingly, be careful not to edit any cell under or in the red categories as this will cause the formula to not work.
                                (click image to enlarge)

If you're not already, I would highly recommend visiting smartcanucks.ca, It's an incredible site with extensive amounts of information regarding deals in canada, all the current grocery coupons available, current Canadian store flyers and lots more. It's all around a great site for anyone who wants to learn about couponing and saving money. You can also visit flyerland.ca to view flyers from stores across Canada. This way you could get one step ahead on planning your shopping trip before the actual flyers even reach your doorstep. There are many great sites you can use to have coupons sent to you for free as well. They are listed on the homepage, please feel free to visit them and sign up if you already haven't.  I would recommend collecting all the coupons on those sites, even the ones for products you normally don't buy, as you may be able to buy that product for extremely cheap or free during a sale, or use it in a trade. Either way you win! Keep a look out when you're shopping as well they're usually many coupons available either on pads near products, or on the products themselves, Remember the larger collection of coupons you have the more likely you will be prepared to start saving big! 

Many stores price-match as well. It's unfortunate however that many people are fearful of price-matching for reasons such as angry customers behind them being held up in line, or fumbling around when trying to find the item in the flyer, those alone are huge stress factors that unfortunately make people avoid that opportunity to save even more. Dreading price-matching myself I decided to switch the tables around to make sure I was fully prepared. The sheet I created as a result, takes the pain out of price matching and reduces time spent at the register. I took it for a field test yesterday at my local No Frills and it worked wonderfully. The cashier's who used it were extremely pleased, as I was making their job easier for them as well, and were impressed on how organized I was... all I did was hand them the sheet along with the related flyers and they breezed right through the process... I was done checking out much quicker than normal and didn't have an impatient line of customers waiting behind me! So for those who are uncomfortable with price-matching this sheet will take that once dreaded task and turn it into an extra money saver.

Please feel free to download this as well if you feel you could benefit from it, it's also located on my download page to download it in either ods (Open Office) or xls (Excel). Here's an example of what is looks like below.

Well that's all for today, I hope this helped give some of you some ideas on how to better prepare!  Always remember, the more prepared you are today, the more ready you'll be tomorrow.

O.P.E.S. (Part 2): Briefing On Organization

Being organized is the key ingredient when it comes to being a successful coupon user and shopper. Like cement it's becomes your strong foundation to build on. Having this foundation will allow you to utilize your time more effectively with an increase in productivity. In addition, staying organized will prove beneficial to you on a personal level as well, by decreasing stress, you'll have more energy allowing you to plan your shopping trip with a focused mind and a positive as well as creative approach. That being said, allow me to share with you how I stay organized to help keep my savings routine stress free.

I'll go ahead and start by discussing how I manage my current household items and groceries. No I don't have an inventory list of every single item, but I would imagine that would be a pretty big list lol. However, I do try to keep my kitchen cupboards, fridge and other areas where various supplies are stored fairly organized. By doing this, I can simply take a quick glance and know right away what I'm missing or running low on that I will need to pick up during the upcoming shopping trip. This saves me both the time and the hassle of having to dig around trying to guess what it is that I'm missing.

I think it's safe to say that we all love coupons. However, there small size and fragile nature make them easy targets and sometimes wind up ruined or lost. If you don't have one already, I would suggest investing in a 3 ring binder and baseball card sleeves to make your own coupon binder. Simply use divider separator's to create your different categories of coupons and you'll have an organized and efficient way to keep track of and locate your coupons when it comes time to use them. I would also recommend using highlighters to highlight the expiration dates on the coupons. Using a variety of colors, assign each month to a different color. Doing this you'll know when a coupon expires with a simple glance, instead of straining your eyes looking for it. My coupon binder is great for storing coupons but I'll admit it's too much to carry into a store every time. After using the "accordion" style coupon holder it wasn't cutting it for me as it still took too much time to find the coupon I needed. I decided to create my own mini coupon binder to help keep me organized in the store. Before I go shopping I pull out exactly what coupons I want to use from my larger home binder and place them into this one. The binder is just a simple day planner/calendar I had found in my basement. I cleared out the outdated calendar but kept the notepad. To make the coupon holders I took the same baseball sleeves I have in my larger binder and carefully cut them into 9 separate sleeves. To make the backing for them I cut hanging file cabinet folders to size and hole punched them to fit in the binder. This way I had a sturdy backing for my sleeves. Using a glue stick, I glued each sleeve to the backing and was able to fit 3 sleeves per page. You can add as many pages as you need to in order to stay completely organized while you shop.

I do however still bring my larger coupon binder with me, but I leave it in the car. I benefit from by doing that in two ways. One way is if I see an item on sale that I need but forgot about on the list I can always go back to the car and find the coupon. That way I'm away from the crowds when I flip through the book looking for it. The second way is this prevents any impulse buys I may be tempted with. By having to go out to the car to get the coupon for the item in question, it gives me time to think about whether I really need that item right now or not. If I really don't feel like going back in to get the item I must not have really needed it to start with lol. Being on a tight budget this really helps me stick to the shopping list I have all planned out.

Here are the pictures of the Mini Binder I created so you can get a better idea!

Become A Successful Couponer Using O.P.E.S. (Part 1)

O.P.E.S. is an acronym I've created to help myself remember everything I need to do to save successfully. It stands for the words Organization, Preparation, Efficiency, and Savings. Following O.P.E.S will assist you in maximizing your savings as well help relieve the stress we sometimes experience while shopping. Over the next few days, I'll discuss each subject of O.P.E.S. individually and share with you how I utilize each one in my own weekly routine and give you ideas that may help you with yours. Until then I challenge you take each aspect of O.P.E.S. and reflect on how they come into play during your weekly shopping routine. Remembering O.P.E.S. when you plan your shopping trip will help you from saying "Oops" in the checkout line.

Stay Vigilant, Posts Coming Soon

Thank you for visiting and welcome troops! Getting ready to start posts soon, so keep checking back. The first briefing will be on the acroynym O.P.E.S. . Don't know what that means? Don't worry you'll know soon. Until then, gear up and get ready to go down range at OCS!