I’d originally considered starting an entirely different blog to focus on the journey I’m about to embark on, but the beauty of Being Kate is that, well, Being Kate is multi-faceted. I try my best to manage the different hats that I wear; wife, daughter, home to a strange life form that has taken over my body, employee of the tax payer, and my new role: extreme saver of money. Mircea and I have some plans for the future that involve a pretty hefty pay cut but we’ve got some time before this goes into effect. In that time, we’re teaching ourselves how to live on one income. So far, so good. Basically because although that one income looks fabulous on paper and gets us taxed out the butt (that’s a technical term, the IRS literally steals money from your hind end) we have enough living expenses that we need to pinch some pennies really really hard to make ends meet. Oh yeah and we’re having a money leaching pooh factory sweet little bundle of joy in a few months so we’ll have the added expense of daycare to boot. So what are we doing so we can save money now for much leaner times in the future? All kinds of fun things like couponing, canning, and switching to off or cheaper brands of everything, including cat food, which is seriously pissing Yukon off. He looks at his bowl with disgust every morning, but let’s be honest; Poodle could stand to lose a couple hundred pounds.
So this first post will be about the couponing. Like all harebrained schemes in our house, this began with Mircea being influenced by the television. While my friend Nikki was visiting this summer, we all lazily sat down on a Sunday night for some good old fashioned television. What was on? Why, Extreme Couponing of course. (Followed by Hoarding: Buried Alive, which I still think is basically the same show as Extreme Couponing) As most people know, Extreme Couponing is a show where people who have a lot more time than me buy all kinds of stuff at the store whether they are using it or not so that they can pay 80-90% less than the average chump at the checkout stand. I can’t make fun of the fact that they buy cat food when they don’t have a cat-most of them are then donating these unused items to charities, but the part that makes me think the show is “Hoarders” is the stockpile that they all have at their home. Apocalyptic proportions people. Enough Chef Boyardee to last until 2024, that is, if it lasts that long. I agree with the idea of spending very little money on groceries but the idea of eating spaghetti from a can is just not something I’m willing to do. Mircea is on board with eating this “food” so I guess we’ll be eating different meals again. I’ll eat Ramen, but there is no chance in hell I’m eating a spaghetti o. NO CHANCE.
So like any good impressionable American, Mircea is on the coupon bandwagon. As we watched the show he had all of these great ideas about how WE can save money and how HE is going to organize the coupons, shop the sales, etc. Do you see where this story is going? Yes, I am on my second week of couponing and I painstakingly organized our coupon binder and I, yes I, spent about 2 hours on Saturday morning while watching Law and Order clipping, sorting and running different sales + coupon scenarios out on paper. And I think I’ve got a pretty good plan for this week. By no means am I saving 80-90%, but so far, these first two weeks that I’ve been a coupon Nazi psycho clipper we’ve saved about 50% on our products and have started a nice little stockpile of toiletries to get us through the hard times that are inevitably ahead. So watch out world, as I get slightly better at this I’ll start sharing some of my finds, but at this point I’m still a fairly reluctant domestic as I was happy to just go on an extreme diet or start hunting foxes and squirrels in our back yard for meat. And if anyone has any tips for me, I’m open for suggestions. I’ve found that Southern Maryland doesn’t seem to be the best place for extreme deals and bargain basement finds.
As a side note, Mircea has actually been fairly committed to this, driving me crazy at all hours of the night while he thinks up other things to hoard and other things to can. (Canning is my next post by the way) But he’s not all selfish. When I told him that I was having some trouble with the coupons for deodorant he said “I’ll use ladies deodorant, that’s fine. I don’t care what I smell like as long as it’s cheap”. That’s commitment.
Being Kate 