2013 coupon statistics (and what i learned from tracking our savings for an entire year)

so, the day weve all been waiting for is finally here (ok maybe its just me). today im going to make the final analysis of my couponing hobby for 2013 (you can read my first, second, and third quarter reviews at their respective links). before i start rattling off the numbers, first id like to give a little background about the project just in case we have any new readers here:

see, i started using coupons somewhere in the second half of 2012 after we moved out of my parents house and into our current apartment. we were totally broke (james worked at a totally shady pizza parlor and i was still a contractor with joanns), i was out of practice with grocery shopping for two (we had lived with my parents for about four months after moving back to california), and our grocery spending was out. of. control. and of course i thought that i could fix our grocery budget problems with coupons. 

and it didnt exactly work out as i had hoped (you can read more about that, as well as some tips on using coupons like a normal person here). and then last january (or maybe at the end of 2012, im not sure), i noticed that i seemed to be spending quite a bit of money on printer ink and newspapers, and it really had me questioning whether or not couponing was a productive use of my time. 

and i needed to figure this out with science. because i guess i decided that it was only a worthwhile hobby if i had the math to back it up. 

so i commited myself to track, for the entire year, all my grocery store savings (coupons and otherwise) and all coupon-related expenses (really just the newspapers and printer ink). i only tracked grocery savings, because i didnt want the data to get distorted by selectively tracking really great trips to joanns and not all our other purchases (i mean, this scientist needs to have a life, too), and the metrics i chose to record were the following: total coupons used, total dollar amount saved, percentage saved, and a cumulative net savings less any related expenses. 

now i just want to congratulate anyone that made it through that last paragraph and point out that I WENT TO ART SCHOOL AND IM TERRIBLE AT MATH SO THIS PROJECT WAS A PRETTY FREAKING HUGE DEAL. 

and now, without any further ado, lets get into some of these numbers:

2014 totals

total coupons used: $772.55

total savings (includes coupons, club card, target card, etc.): $2656.61

total expenses: $181.59

average savings per transaction: 39.45 %

and my total net savings for 2013:

$2485.02

im serious. and if you dont believe me you are more than welcome to come over and double check my little hello kitty notebook for errors. two thousand four hundred and eighty five dollars. for reals. 

and what makes this number extra crazy is that we live in los angeles. where the prices are (only slightly) higher and NOBODY doubles coupons. and we live in a one bedroom apartment so i cant stockpile anything (ok, theres a bag of toiletries that were free or 25 cents in the closet where i keep the vacuum). also over the course of this year ive cut WAY back on the quantity of groceries we buy. so that means i literally cut (or printed) $772 of coupons and only used them on things we actually used. 

now im being completely honest here, i started tracking this because i thought this wasnt a productive hobby. so im just as shocked as you are (unless of course youre a real extreme couponer and thats pathetic). 

so the numbers are cool and all, but because were doing science here, the real question we need to ask is what did i learn from this experiment?

and it turns out, kind of a lot:

i learned that coupons will not solve your grocery budget problems.

i learned that the purpose of coupons is to trick you into buying things that you dont need and spending more than you had intended to.

i learned that it takes a LOT of time and effort to make coupons work for you. 

i learned that keeping a notebook of statistics for an entire year is way harder than it sounds. 

i learned that its really hard to keep track of grocery receipts long enough to extract the necessary data.

i learned that sometimes i really like having a newspaper subscription. 

i learned that most weeks we dont actually have time to read the newspaper. 

i learned that sometimes sausage goes on sale for fifty cents a pack the day after you used all your coupons buying it for $2. 

i learned that food coupons are mostly just for junk food. 

i learned that buying the expensive cat food with coupons is actually cheaper than buying the cheap cat food without.

i learned that "dollars saved" and "percent saved" mean totally different things. 

i learned that its entirely possible to feed a family of three on a vegetarian and gluten free diet for $50 a week (but its not very fun). 

i learned that a years worth of newspapers and printer ink costs $181. 

i learned that the best way to save money on groceries (and everything) is to simply not buy things you dont need. 

i learned that grocery store prices are falsely inflated to make the sales better and most foods are cheaper at sprouts or target. 

i learned that coupons are really awesome for the first half of the year and taper off into almost nothing around the holidays. 

i learned that all those little bits of money really do add up to some meaningful cash. 

but most importantly, i proved with science that couponing was in fact, a productive use of my time, because we did not have an extra $2400 to blow on groceries this year. 

will i keep couponing? definitely. will i keep detailed statistics for 2014? im not sure yet. 

thanks for sticking around to the end! i hope you didnt get too bored.  

third quarter coupon statistics

its that time again, time for me to get all nerdy about my coupons. ive really been looking forward to doing this post, because, well, honestly.... im not using that many coupons anymore. 

why? partly because of my diet, partly because summertime is a really bad time of the year for coupons, and partly because weve just overall been spending a lot less money. so naturally i was curious to see how this quarter would look compared to the others (you can see my other statistic posts here and here). 

just as i had expected, my total coupon savings went down, i only used $147.72 of coupons (as opposed to last quarters $240.25), as did my overall savings, which was $625.30 (last quarters was $738). im not at all upset about this, because i HAVE noticed a major decrease in what im spending to begin with (which is great). also, my percentage saved per transaction has gone way up, from 37% per transaction last quarter, all the way up to 41%! 

so even though were using less coupons, and our "savings" dollar amount has gone down a bit, were not only spending less, but saving a greater percentage of what were spending (if that makes sense), which is totally awesome. not as awesome as our total cumulative net grocery savings (after subtracting newspapers and printer ink) is $2064.59. 

my 50th post. and second quarter coupon statistics.

first things first id like to take a few minutes to blubber about how this is my fiftieth (FIFTIETH!) blog post. seriously. fifty posts. this is a really huge deal for me because, well, when i started, i didnt think that anyone would even read it and knowing me it wasnt going to last, given that im lazy and unmotivated and quit everything i start. so of all the people that are surprised that this little blog is still going (and that people other than my mom are reading it), i am definitely the most surprised. i wish i had something more exciting to say about this, but im really just still in disbelief that its even still going. maybe my 100th post will be more special. maybe. 

anyways, back to our regularly scheduled programming... 

as you may have noticed, today is july 1st, which means that i had to clean out all of my expired june coupons:

today also marks SIX MONTHS of tracking my grocery savings (you can read more about it here). now since ive recently had to make HUGE changes to my diet and how i shop (read more here and here) , i was really worried that i wouldnt  be able to stick to our budget, or that couponing would become a waste of time, or that id have to give up my little game of trying to beat my saving percentage high score. well, im happy to announce that NONE of those things happened!

obviously my new dietary restrictions mean that we now require some pretty expensive staples, and that were spending a LOT more money on produce than before, however were also not buying any processed/packaged foods (which are actually much more expensive than fresh foods) so things even out. ive also stopped stocking up on "extra" food, and just buying exactly what we need for the coming week, so after just a few weeks i managed to keep our $50 a week grocery budget in effect, and have managed to come in under budget a few times. while im not really using that many food coupons (most of them are for foods i cant eat), im still using LOTS of target coupons (and their new cartwheel app, its my new favorite) and hardly paying anything for our household/toiletry-type items (also ive been planning our trips a little better so we only have to go to target once every 2-3 weeks). and despite all the little changes ive made to trim down our grocery spending, im STILL making great savings percentages! 

so here are the numbers for this quarter: ive used $240.25 in actual coupons, and saved a total of $738 dollars (an average of 37% savings per transaction). so while this is a little less impressive than last time, i feel its also worth noting that i am consistently spending less than i was before. and my total cumulative savings for the year (less newspapers and printer ink)? $1481.82. seriously. i dont even know what id do if i hadnt learned how to shop this efficiently (thanks mom!), because let me tell you, we do NOT have that kind of money.  

coupon organizing day and first quarter statistics.

by far the most difficult part of couponing is keeping everything organized so that you know what you have and how many and when they expire (at least in my case, i suppose this part comes naturally for some). since i started doing this less than a year ago, ive gone through many different methods, and now that im getting several copies of each sunday paper insert ive had to re-think EVERYTHING. 

right now i have one copy of each coupon in a coupon book i got at an office store a couple years ago, and all the "extras" paper clipped together by type in a small accordion file, and its mostly working, if somewhat bulky to use while shopping. but im sure ill figure out something more efficient someday. 

i used to check for expired coupons every week as i added my new ones, but that meant that EVERY week i had to meticulously sort through every single coupon to maybe throw out a handful, but i lost patience and decided that i would just add in the new coupons and sort out the expired ones once a month. this ended up being a big mistake since adding an entire months coupons (many of which expired through the month) to my book without taking any out basically exploded to book. seriously, it wasnt even close to closing. then i realized that most (though not all) coupons expire the end of the month, with most of the others expiring somewhere around the 15th. so now i clean them out twice a month, which has turned out to be much more manageable. 

this week turned out very nicely and my book is slimmer and more organized than ever. since it was a holiday weekend and there was only one small insert with a few coupons i even wanted, AND it was the end of the month and i was able to throw out this giant pile:

as good as that felt, that wasnt even the best part. this year i challenged myself to keep track of how much money i spent on couponing as well as how much money i saved, since after a few months i noticed that all the newspapers and printer ink was starting to add up. so i decided on a few different metrics to track monthly (total paper coupons used, total club card/redcard savings, total savings, average % saved, and the cumulative total profit after all coupon-related expenses), as well as at the end of the year. (i also decided that i would only keep track of purchases at vons and target, since those stores account for virtually all household purchases) i realize this is an INCREDIBLY nerdy thing to do, but i just HAD to find out if couponing was a mathematically worthwhile hobby, since it really is more time consuming than you would think. (also i secretly love calculating statistics since thats about the only kind of math i can do well, but dont tell anyone)

i really had no idea how this was going to go, but the end of march marked the first quarter of collected data, and i was so excited about the results that i just HAD to share them. 

my total (cumulative) savings at the end of march (all vons club, coupons, redcard, sales etc.) was $775.72. (and thats after spending $75 on newspapers and printer ink, so really weve saved $850.72) . now, i know youre thinking "well OBVIOUSLY you must have to spend a TON of money to have saved that much", and i would like to take a second to point out that we have a strict grocery budget of $50 a week at vons, and about $35 a week at target, and thats for EVERYTHING, from food to toiletries and even diapers. so, no we do NOT spend alot of money on groceries. for further reference our average savings per transaction is around 40%.  

unfortunately, we arent exactly in the financial position for this to be an extra $775 in our pockets, its more like $775 of groceries that we would have otherwise had to do without, but someday, if i keep up with this, we will get to enjoy this "extra" money. anyways, long story short, i have, in fact, mathematically concluded that couponing is, indeed, a worthwhile pastime.