Now that the decision to stick with day care is made (insert huge sigh of relief) It’s time for me to move onto the more practical consequences of going with full time daycare. The first biggie I am looking to tackle is how to work it into my budget. The only way to do that is to slash my non-fixed spending by about 50%.
I thought about radical ideas like selling my car and driving a clunker but then I put my banker hat on I can see that the ROI is poor and the stress factor high.
So it’s onto slashing the expenses that are slashable. Ok baby steps. Literally actually, the first coupon I used was for a big baby expense, diapers. Now, I am already a pretty savvy shopper and I do not buy diapers unless they are on sale, but I also only buy name brand because I have had one too many leakage issues with the copy cat varieties. I generally pay between 20-25 cents per diaper for the name brands. The last pack I bought was from Cosco (I borrow my Mom’s membership for further savings) and it had a $7.00 coupon and in the box there was coupons for some mom diapers aka maxi pads. I found those on sale at a discount store (Fresh Co) for $3 minus my $1 coupons so Always with wings were only $2 a pack. How angelic, Mom and baby diapered in style at bargain basement pricing.
This peaked my interest in coupons. I know that TLC has dedicated an entire show to it and it seems to be a popular blogging subject but it also seems mostly American. Also the people on the show seem to get hundreds of dollars of free groceries but the food is mainly high processed fast food crap and in the kind of bulk that turns their garages into food banks.
So, I wondered if it’s worth hunting down coupons in Canada?
I read an article from a cool site called LEARNVEST that talked about strategies on saving on groceries and they found that when they compared couponing to other ways to save, it was better to buy from discount grocery stores for the basics then a farmers market or specialty store for the culinary treats like pesto then the time and effort it took to find and use coupons.
I plan to delve deeper into the world of coupons and discounts for the things I need as one tool to slay the big bad dragon of a grocery bill but I’d love your input.
Do you use coupons? Is it worth the effort or a make work project for already too busy mama’s?