Summer of Savings Series

Guest post by: Stephanie at Queen of Quirky

In this economy, brides and grooms are doing everything to save money while throwing a memorable bash for their friends and families. Early on in our wedding plans, my fiancé and I committed to throwing a wedding for 250 of our friends and family members for less than $10,000. It hasn’t been easy, but here are some things we’ve learned so far that might help you:

• Plan your wedding off-season. We are having a February wedding and have found that everyone from caterers to venues and photographers are willing to cut you a great deal during the winter months. Remember – they need the business too. If you could do a Friday or Sunday wedding, your savings could be even more!

• Ask for ala cart services. I found this to be true with photography packages. Do you really need that engagement photo session? Could you make your own photo album later? Your photographer may be able to offer services outside the packaged deals advertised in the brochure or Web site – so ask!

• Want food? Think outside the box. With a budget of $9 per person for catering, we quickly found out that we wouldn’t be able to feed our guests very much if we went with a standard catering menu. Those frou frou cheese plates and dips are tasty but they don’t go very far to feed a hungry, dancing crowd. We opted to drop the traditional wedding fare and feed our guests food that fit our theme – a movie theatre wedding. We are getting more bang for our buck by putting together a menu featuring a gourmet hot dog bar, nacho bar, popcorn and pretzels. You could do this with any theme though – think mini cheeseburgers, fancy grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup – food that doesn’t cost a lot but tastes great is a winning solution.

• Don’t reach for the top shelf when it comes to planning your bar. That is a huge savings right there. We decided to provide beer and wine for our guests. This was a hard decision for my fiancé who really wanted to throw a great party for our loved ones. After we saw the price tag for a full bar, we realized that people can still have fun and will enjoy our beer and wine budget bar.

• Set the mood for your party with custom invites made by an up and coming designer. Everyone has to start somewhere; even Vera Wang probably was hawking her goods at a discount early in her career. The site www.etsy.com is a great resource for budget weddings because it is populated by up & coming artists who will often cut you a great price on a one-of-a-kind item. Do a search for the item you are looking for, then send a personal message to the seller letting them know you are planning a budget wedding, but you love their work. Chances are, they’ll be more than willing to work with you at a great price!

Whatever you do, don’t lose track of the focus of your event – to celebrate your new lives together. It’s not worth going into debt over, so think outside the box and keep it quirky!

Summer of Savings Series

Guest post by: Cathie Frausto

I found this money saving tip by accident. We were out of storage bags so I told my husband to wrap the left over lettuce in aluminum foil He didn’t quite get it all covered so I added a second layer of foil and we put the salad in the fridge.
At the time there were just the 2 of us, now there are 5 with the addition of daughter-in-law and grandchildren, so it was almost 2 weeks later before we needed some lettuce again for tacos. I took the foil out expecting to open it up and find that slimy smelly mess of decomposed lettuce. Lo and behold the lettuce looked like I had just put it in the fridge and when I went to tear a piece off it had that crisp snap sound. We now bring our lettuce home from the store and immediately remove the plastic wrapping and double wrap it in foil, we very rarely throw out lettuce and save money by not having to buy it so often as it will last 3 to 4 weeks as long as you keep it double wrapped.

We found this also works for celery. The only difference is it works best if you wrap the celery in paper towel before double wrapping it in the foil.

Hope this helps save you some money and have a grandmalicious day!

Summer of Savings Series

Guest Post By: Frances of Frugal Fairhope

I don’t know about you, but I get access to hundreds of printable coupons every day. I use to print almost all of them. Then I found out I was tossing more coupons than I used.

The debate in my mind is if you don’t print now who is to say it will be available to print later when the deal comes up? When it comes to printing it is a personal time management choice. How much time do you really have to print twice, pull them off the printer, cut, and file? Not to mention if you have problems printing, like I do most of the time.

First, let’s step back and take a look at what you are trying to accomplish. We have three general strategies in the FrugalFairhope household about grocery shopping:

1) We only buy what we need or will use.
2) We only buy what we can give away for a good cause.
3) We only buy what we can get for absolutely free (no RRs or ECBs).

By using these strategies it helps me avoid the shopper’s fever and buying too much. Just because dog food is on sale for $0.10, do I really need to stock up on dog food when we don’t have a dog? Yes, I could give it to the Humane Society, but wouldn’t my time and money be better spent by volunteering to walk a dog a couple times a month, donating used towels, sheets, or blankets, or even writing them a check for a donation? Could I also send that coupon to the military families overseas?

In fact, our animal shelters in Fairhope would prefer to have money or volunteer work in lien of food. I think they try to keep all the animals on the same diet? As you know mixing brands of food could be upsetting to a dog or cat’s stomach. I know this example is a little extreme, but think about it. We have all done it, bought something we didn’t use.

I am committed to our family using everything we buy for the stockpile or on sale. Throwing away a grocery stockpile item is not only wasteful, but that item that cost time, money, and storage room was not a successful deal. It was not a bargain, and we avoid this at all costs.

Another debate that I have is the last strategy. Do I waste my precious time printing or clipping a coupon that I may never need as a freebie?

For printed coupons, I only print items that fit in the first strategy. I take the risk and hope that the coupon will be around when I need it. If not, it was not meant to be. Such is life.

Still following the first two guidelines, I do however save most if not all the Sunday coupons. How do I organize them? I don’t clip it, I save the page and store it in my Only in Case of Free (OCF) file, or if I have to clip the coupon (already have the page cut into pieces), I place it in a small index box that I keep with my other coupons. These OCF coupons are filed by company name (for example Glade goes under “G”, Suave lotion would be filed under “S”). We wouldn’t have a use for scented products or lotions in our house but if it was a true freebie, we can sell it on eBay or give it away in a gift bag at Christmas.

For  more great tips from Francis visit her blog: Frugal Fairhope

Summer of Savings Series

Guest post by: Lois A. Gay

Living on a fixed income is tough! I am the full time caretaker of my husband who is disabled. I have no income of my own, and our family of three survives on social security disability. There have been so many times in our lives that we have been unable to purchase everything we needed. Due to couponing, I am able to have what my family needs plus an abundance more.

I got started couponing after watching videos on Youtube of other couponers. After trying for twenty years on my own, I was able to realize that I was going about everything all wrong. I thought one coupon could solve all of my problems. Boy was I mistaken!

After hearing how others were saving money on their groceries using coupons, I set out to challenge myself and see how much I could save. This competition against myself continues every time I go to the grocery store.

I clip coupons every week and insert them into photo sleeves in a three ring binder. I have sectioned them off alphabetically by product. For example, I have one section with nothing but Air freshener coupons. Then I go online, check sales papers, and talk with other coupon clippers to find out which stores have the best deals and where the sales are for the week. I keep track of my savings from every shopping trip. I have been able to save up to 86% on my total grocery bill! For $158.58 worth of groceries I only paid $25.05. I only buy things my family uses, all name brand products.

The most important thing I’ve learned so far is that you need to try and get a network of friends all doing the same thing. There are about ten of us involved in this group. Everything we’ve learned is from the blogs we read then trying all your ideas out. We spend a lot of time on the phone and getting as many copies of the newspaper inserts we can get our hands on. My daughter in-law and I started this group. We tell each other what we have learned and where to look for deals. So I wish all of you luck with your couponing may it be as rewarding for you as it has been for us.

Check out my blog at http://oldladywithcoupons.blogspot.com/ for more on how I save tons of money!

The Coupon Cupboard is kicking off the Summer of Savings for July and August. 2 months of expert posts on ways to save money! If you blog this is an excellent opportunity to gain new readers this summer!

We realize that we don’t know it all when it comes to saving money so we are looking for other experts in this field to help our readers save even more money this summer! Would you like to guest post?

Here is what we are offering guest posters:

• Exposure here at The Coupon Cupboard. With over 3,000 people online here at any given time that could really add up to a lot of exposure for you!
• A byline link at the top of the post
• An about the author box with up to three links to your sites
• A years silver membership to the forum to help you promote your blog all year long.

Here is what we are asking:

• 500 word post on the topic of saving money.
• No links inside the post unless they are relevant to the content. Meaning, it would like to the resource you are talking about. This is not the place for self promotion~that is what the author box is for
• EDITED for grammar and spelling
• No duplicate content. That hurts us both. You can re-purpose an already published article by changing it up, especially the title and first paragraph. For both our sakes, change 50% of it.

As you know, we write a lot about coupons on this site and that is great if you do too. We would really love to see some unique idea’s on other stuff as well: gas, clothes, back to school, energy, gardening. You name it, give us something different and our readers will probably become yours as well!

Our publishing schedule will be dictated by the amount of accepted guest posts. You will be notified if your post is published.

Submit your articles here!