I spend a lot of time reading and thinking about coupons. I think that coupons are a great way for people to save money on the items that they buy regularly. I also think that that there is some interesting social history around coupons. (Does anyone get nostalgic thinking about clipping coupons with Mom when you were a kid?!) But what I’m thinking more and more about coupons is that the in-store, printable, clipped-out coupons that most people think of when they think of couponing are really totally inefficient and unproductive in today’s society.

There have been a lot of problems reported with printable coupons recently. There are huge problems with coupon fraud which exist primarily because criminals are able to easily manipulate printable coupons to get more money back than the manufacturer wants to allot. There are also problems with too many people trying to print out coupons and then creating in-store problems when they all flood into the store at the same time.

So what’s the solution? Technology seems to be changing in a way that will allow us to avoid use of in-store coupons in the future but to still save money with coupon deals. We already see this happening in the form of online promo codes which let you enter the code into your online shopping sites to get savings. There is a lot less trouble with coupon fraud using these types of coupons and of course you avoid the issue of shopping in overcrowded stores that run out of the products they’ve issued coupons for.

But what about when you do want to shop in stores? I think that coupons may be popular but society is leaning in favor of just offering good overall deals instead of coupon deals. For example, many people have found that they can save just as much money by buying generic store brands of items as they can from buying name brands with coupons. They skip the coupons and still get the savings.

What do you think? Do in-store coupons still make sense or are they going to become a thing of the past?

Tags: coupon codes, coupons, kathryn vercillo, Personal Finance, save money, society, Technology

I frequently read blogs about coupons, frugal living and how to save money. Reading about these topics helps inspire me to reduce my own spending so that I can live a simpler life. Some of the most popular blogs related to this topic are the blogs of coupon queens, women who have turned the use of coupons into an art form that also seems to earn them an income.

There are a lot of tricks used by these coupon queens to get the most for their money with coupons. Ultimately, though, these tricks seems to boil down to three basic things. Coupon queens concentrate their efforts on searching for and saving as many coupons as possible (using coupons for everything), stacking coupons which means using multiple coupons for the same purchase, and always looking for new information about the best ways to save money.

People who want to learn to save money with coupons but who don’t want to invest the time and energy to go ahead and become coupon queens should find that working on these three tricks will help them to save the kind of money that they want to save through the use of coupons.

Tags: coupon queens, couponing, coupons, Frugal Living, Personal Finance, save money

I’ve been reading a lot lately about coupon queens and coupon divas. These are people who pride themselves on an ability to use coupons to save a large amount of money on everything that they purchase. They offer all sorts of tricks and tips to enhance money-saving with coupon use.

This is all smart stuff. However, I think that the average person needs to balance saving money with saving time. Clipping coupons can end up wasting a lot of time if you don’t know what to look for and how to do it efficiently.

One of the most important things to learn if you want to save money with different types of coupons is how many different types of coupons are out there and which ones are even worth your time. There are coupons for free stuff, coupons for half off, coupons for buy one get one free … You have to really know what’s what if you’re going to be able to quickly sift through coupons and really make use of them without spending too much time on them.

See my recent article describing 10 different types of coupons to learn more about this area of personal finance.

Tags: coupons, discount codes, kathryn vercillo, money, Personal Finance, saving money

Remember when Mom or Grandma used to get out the Sunday paper and clip out coupons. She probably organized them in some sort of envelope or fancy organizer and then took them to the store with her when she did her grocery shopping. Although there are still people out there using coupons like this today, it really doesn’t make sense any more to rely on these printed types of coupons to save money.

Printed coupons just don’t have the benefits that they used to have for most people. For one thing, it has been shown that you can probably save as much or more money by shopping for store brands instead of buying name brands using a coupon. More importantly, the whole process of printing coupons (whether the manufacturer prints them or you do it yourself at home) is time-consuming and costly and it makes saving money in this way inefficient.

Online discount codes make sense in today’s society. Mobile phone coupons make sense in today’s society. But printed coupons just don’t make a lot of sense anymore.

Tags: coupons, Frugal Living, kathryn vercillo, save money, society, Technology