Okay, I have a Confession to make!!!

I don’t clip coupons, nor does my wife (yeah, I know… here I claim to be frugal, and yet I don’t do this very frugal activity)!  In my earlier post called 10 Millionaire Lifestyle Secrets, I indentify SmartMoney’s secret #2 “I shop at Walmart” secret!  It explains that the $100,000+ income crowd clips coupons.  Now as I said, I don’t clip coupons, but… my grandmother did!  So I’m going to start out describing the system that she used, then I’m going to describe some more modern techniques.

But before that, today, I also learned that one of the bigger blog sites FreeMoneyFinance‘s spouse clips coupons.  The blogger at FreeMoneyFinance fit’s the Secret #2 description very well, and even makes more than that!  Click the following link to read his article called:  How to Earn $100 an Hour (Or Save $100,000 in Your Lifetime).  This FMF article is truly an eye opener and a must read!!!

After using Coupons to save money, calculate how much you saved per month (or week), and pump it from your savings into a brokerage account, bonds or CDs.

Now onto the coupons saving methods both classic and modern!

The classic way, the type of system my grandmother used:

Basically she clipped coupons from the newspaper!  Then she had white well worn envelopes with names in the front to them that she would put the coupons into, and they coupons were organized by product name type and date within the envelope.  She then put the envelopes in an accordian style folder.

At first she started this process on the dining room table, but during football season, she would setup her small TV in the dining area.  She would do coupons while my grandfather would classify old coins and put them in sleeves.  She effectively took a negative time consuming activity and made it a positive by doing it while she was enjoying listening (and watching), the football game.

Times are different today!

Back when my grandmother clipped coupons, the Internet didn’t have the bandwidth it does today (anyone remember the 2400 baud modems?).  Today it’s possible to do things such as double savings (this is where you can use 2 coupons on the same product.  One from the store and 1 from the manufacturer), and print all kinds of coupons from the Internet!  Since I’m new to this, I can’t vouch for any of the new techniques, so instead I’ll leave you with a great intro to coupon clipping video:

And for you coupon clipper extremists, here is a video about people that really squeeze the old screaming pennies!