Couponing Not Always Money Smart for WAHMs

I may get in trouble for this one.

Couponing is a hot topic.  I am seeing a lot of blog posts and tweets from moms who are spending a few hours every week scouring the web for coupons and plotting out their shopping trips with an eye for saving the most money possible.

So if I come along and suggest that couponing isn’t always the best way for a work at home mom to spend her time – I may step on some toes and end up getting flamed on the coupon forums.

But I just have to go ahead and say it.

Couponing isn’t always the best way for a WAHM to spend her time!

If we travel back to the golden era of coupons in my lifetime, we’ll see the grocery stores offering double and triple coupon deals.  Back then, I was a coupon freak.  We didn’t have the internet then – it was strictly Sunday paper coupon circular clipping.

I loved hitting the stores and seeing the discounts add up on my receipt.  Walking out of the store with a box of cereal that only cost me seventeen cents was pretty intoxicating.

That didn’t last though.  I think someone somewhere realized that somebody was losing money on the deal – because those double and triple deals dried up.  Once a coupon was only worth face value – couponing lost its shine for me.  Most coupons were for brands that I wouldn’t normally buy – and even with the coupon discount, it was usually more expensive than the cheaper brand on my list.

My best friends mom was a coupon and sale page Diva.  She read all the papers and planned out a shopping list that usually involved Meijers, Kroger, ShopRite and the Farmer’s Market.  Saturday shopping started at 7am and ended sometime after lunch.  She certainly saved a ton of money and I wanted to be like her in the worst way.

But my shopping budget was about 25% of hers – and with a one year old on the trip with me – it just didn’t work the same way.  He was ready to be done with the whole shopping trip after the first store.

Of course, my then husband, a frugal man if ever there was one – pointed out that we saved way more when we stuck to store brands and bulk deals than when I shopped the big brands with coupons.  (I know, I know – off brands aren’t always great.)

I pretty much gave up on coupons then and have never paid them much attention since.  I can’t claim to be knowledgeable about coupons today – but still, I’m going to stick to my claim that couponsing isn’t always the smart thing for a WAHM to spend her time on.  Let me explain why:

If you’re spending an hour couponing each week and spending another extra hour running around to separate stores – and you’re saving $10 or $20 on your groceries… could you have done better by simply working on your business during those two hours?

I would have to save $50-100+ on my groceries to make it worth giving up two hours of work – so couponing just isn’t a good activity for me.

If you’re a VA making $20 an hour, and you spend 2 hours a week couponing, are you saving more than $40 a week with your coupons?

If you’re a writer making $15 per article, and you spend 2 hours a week couponing, are saving more than $45 a week with your coupons?

Frankly, I think 2 hours is a conservative figure.  I know many are spending way more than that.

So I challenge you to consider what you can earn in an hour and compare that to how much time you spend tracking down coupons, talking, chatting, twittering, posting about coupons, printing and clipping coupons and going to all the different stores – and figure out if you’re really ‘saving’ money.