The Value of Coupons

As this is my first foray into blogging, I will give an introduction. With a background in accounting and history, I had never put serious effort into personal writing. Recently, I woke up from a dream where I had found enlightenment, or rather enjoyment, from writing a blog for personal happiness. Consequently, here is my first endeavor. These blogs will have no relation to accounting or history, unless I receive suggestions to the contrary. They will not be pedantic or instructional. Rather, they will simply be my observations written in my own prose, hence the title of the blog.

Shall we begin? You know those packets of coupons you get in the mail from P&G, the grocery store, and other consumer goods companies? Fifty cents off when you buy two tubes of toothpaste - is that really a deal? What about those 20% off coupons in your junk inbox? I find neither of those as valuable as the ones that I actually take the time to find online. To me, the real deal is the coupon that I take the effort to look for, rather than the one that finds its way into my mailbox or inbox. 

Woot, Groupon, Living Social. Do those ring a bell? To the savvy coupon collector, probably not, unless you spend a good deal of your time online. My mom, the everlasting coupon clipper but loses them all once she puts them someplace, has just recently started looking online for those coupons that seem too good to be true. Personally, most of them are worth your search time, but rolling through those sites for those deals is really not as time consuming as you think. Just as checking your email or reading the news, adding a couple sites for coupon deals seems almost intuitive. When I was away at school, my parents and I would chat, but some of the better time my mom and I spent talking to each other was about new coupon websites and what good deals we had come across lately. Perhaps driven by materialism on my end and frugality on my mom's, we had found a hobby that gave us some level of personal achievement, money savings, and some easy conversation tips that we could share with anyone.  

Starting your online coupon clipping habits can seem daunting with our overly packed schedules, but for the OCD in all of us, here are a few tips:

- save all those coupons by bookmarking your sites, copying all of the deals into an Excel/Word file, or creating a separate email inbox category. I find this way to be much more orderly 

- start with one big coupon site like freeshipping.org or twitter.com/dealsplus. Just one of these sites can prevent website surf overload.

The actual value of coupons is the face value which it advertises, but the real value to you is how excited you are when you're clicking save or sharing the site with a friend. Everyone has that hobby that takes a few minutes every day that gives you happiness, pleasure, or even peace of mind. Online coupon clipping is that activity for me. Hopefully reading this will help you discover your inner coupon seeker or find something else that gives both satisfaction and a few pennies saved.