Hello, I'm Sam

.....and I'm a frugalista.  I have been a saver and a serious bargain shopper since I was a kid.  I've had ups and downs, financially.  My inner frugal ninja has helped me weather every storm (even when some of those storms were of my own making courtesy of bad choices when I was young).  I shop the sales and stockpile, and I have ever since I first had to start buying my own groceries.

I used to clip coupons long ago, before there was really much of an internet.  It was tedious, all the clipping, sorting, filing, searching the sale ads.  Knowing I had a coupon that would match up with the sale I saw, only to dig it out of my file to find it had expired really wasn't fun.  That happened a lot because flipping through all those coupons to weed out the expired ones was not how I wanted to spend a fine weekend afternoon.  After a couple of years I decided it was too much work and that my time was better spent doing other things.  I always shopped the sales, stocked up on the lowest prices, so the financial hit wasn't all that hard.

That worked reasonably well for many years, until last summer.  We had an unexpected car repair ($3k transmission rebuild for a two year old car) that necessitated reworking the budget to find the money.  Most of the wiggle room was in our grocery budget.  Since we had a good stockpile, I didn't worry too badly about continuing to eat.

I spent 4 months with less than $50 a month to buy groceries for my family.  Near the end of that time, I gave birth to child #4.  With the prospect of paying for diapers, no budget with which to buy them, and no better ideas on how to stretch our paper thin budget just a little thinner, I turned to couponing again.

I've been couponing again for just over 6 months, and I'm hooked.  The internet makes it all so much easier.

In the part of the country I live in, all the stores have rules and restrictions on the use of coupons.  You can't really find that one awesome deal, swoop in and clear the shelves.  They've tailored their coupon policies to prevent that, and that's OK.  I'm not above developing a shopping addiction and becoming a slave to a good deal, but with the coupon policies in place near me it would be almost impossible to escalate to that level of obsession.  I suppose it could be done, but not without a fair amount of effort.  My time, like my money, is valuable to me.  It doesn't make sense to me to spend my time trying to figure out how to spend more money when we get along just fine with the current restrictions.