Print Your Own Money

What would you say if I told you that you could print your own money?  It is perfectly legal and there are no poor consequences.

After this week's grocery shopping trip, I've decided that printing coupons is like printing my own money.  There are a few different groups of thought on coupons.  Some folks make their grocery list based on what is on sale and what they have for coupons.  That doesn't work for me.  I make my list, know what I keep stocked in the house and when I find coupons to match my shopping habits, it print them.    I spend about 15 minutes a week clicking the print button to get coupons.

Want to find coupons?  There are a  number of sources for the coupons that are available on the web.   I subscribe to MoneySavingMom.com in my blog reader-each of her posts comes through like an e-mail with the subject line reading the deal she found coupons for.  I skim through the headers and if her deals aren't stuff I usually buy, I delete.  Then every couple of days I'll click through and get the coupons.  Coupons.com and SmartSource.com are two of the main websites where I go to print coupons.  Most allow you to print a coupon twice and photocopying the coupons is a no-no.  These websites re-set the print counters at the beginning of the month and add new coupons on a regular basis.

This week when we went shopping, I had craft store coupons, grocery coupons, and birthday coupons ...

We are working on redecorating parts of our house.  I took a minute to print the ACMoore coupons - one from my computer, one from HandyMans - and we saved $30 on picture frames that we wanted to get.

Then came the grocery coupons.  Like I said before, I print coupons for things I'm going to buy anyway and will give me the best deal: pasta, coffee, olive oil, contact solution.  For example, this month I needed pasta, Ronzoini has great gobs of coupons out there and my store happened to have it on sale, making my pasta $0.25 a box.  All told: $12 in grocery coupons.

Finally the birthday coupons.  Certain places give you deals on your birthday - Cold Stone is one of them.  Their coupons are good for a week around your birthday.  So, we got free ice cream.  This was a treat because we probably wouldn't have gone to Cold Stone otherwise.  ($8.)

At the end of the day, doing my normal shopping I managed to spend $50 of money I printed myself.  Not bad for a little bit of time, ink and recycled paper (coupons get printed on the back of paper to reuse in our house)!