My Take on Extreme Couponing

I've seen a lot of posts on the TLC series Extreme Couponing. If you aren't familiar with it, it follows people who use an elaborate coupon system to save money. When I say elaborate, I mean things like getting dozens of coupon inserts from neighbors, ordering clipped coupons from online clipping services, and even dumpster diving to get enough coupons; searching websites and circulars to match up the best deals; spending hours planning a shopping trip; and doing marathon shopping trips that usually involve multiple carts (one person had nine). And when I talk about saving money, I mean dropping a $500 grocery bill down to $6.

I'm all for clipping coupon and watching sales. I think that everyone should at least glance through whatever coupons they get (in my case, some through direct mail and some with the newspaper) and skim over the week's circulars for their favorite stores to see what's on sale and where they can save money. You may not save much, but consider this: If you can take $10 off your grocery bill every week and put it in just a basic savings account earning 2% interest, in 30 years, you will have over $19,000 in the bank. If you cut more corners and invest wisely, it could be a lot more.

For me, I like saving money and keep an eye out for good coupons and try to use them at the right time. I also watch the circulars. I had initially tried to do a price book where I tracked the prices of various items at the stores I frequented to see which store had the lowest price, how low the price was, and how often it went on sale. That didn't work because I made it too complicated. Still, just by flipping through circulars, I've started to figure out "good" prices for certain things. Eventually, I may retry to price book, but I'm not sure.

Anyway, as anyone with common sense should be able to figure out, you can save quite a bit of money through learning prices, applying coupons where appropriate, and stocking up whenever possible. With some things, it may not make that much difference. If it takes you six months to use all of a product and it only costs $3 at it's most expensive and $2 at it's cheapest....well, over ten years, if you manage to always get it at the cheapest price, you've managed to save $20. Again, it does add up. However, for more expensive items that are used quickly? That's when it gets you. For example, my Dad's ophthalmologist recommended he take ICaps, a supplement for eye health. After shopping around, the best price I found ran about $15-17 dollars for a month's supply. I found them buy one get one half off and used a $3 coupon and saved quite a bit. (Then I realized they were cheaper on Amazon and kicked myself, but that's another story...) They point it, save $5 on a product that you're buying monthly and that adds up to $60 a year or $600 over ten years. Do that on a few things and the savings start to add up, letting you build a nice emergency fund, save more for retirement, or just have a little extra money to play with...or all three.

In short, I support reasonable, commonsense efforts to save money.

That said, I'm not sure that what any of the "Extreme Couponers" did was really about saving money. And, if it was, at what cost? One thing I noticed was that when the person being featured would talk about her stockpile (and there's almost always a stockpile), the music sounded very similar to what was used on Hoarders. In fact, I pointed out to my roommate that this show was genius on the part of TLC because they would have a good idea of where to find people to feature on their hoarding show Hoarding: Buried Alive. Their stockpiles had, in some cases, started taking over their life. I'm all for stocking up and I would love to have at least 3 months worth of longer lasting supplies and the ability to eat for two weeks without shopping (and I also need to stock drinking water), but there's a limit. I don't want the last thing I see at night and the first thing I see in the morning to be a shelf full of toilet paper. And I don't care if mustard never really goes bad, I don't want to eat three year old mustard. Furthermore, in a book on organization, the author had a nice exercise to see what disorganization really cost. It involved figuring out how much of each room was occupied by junk and figuring out how much it compared to your mortgage. How much are these people paying to store their stockpiles?

Second, it was time consuming. If you have extra time, why not use it to save money by clipping coupons? I could even see someone approaching it as a nine to five job, because if you can get a months worth of groceries for $5, that could potentially offset a low-paying job. But a lot of the people had jobs and families and still dedicated an insane amount of time to saving money. One woman worked a full-time job and spent 70 hours a week on coupons. How much is their time worth? If you're getting $1000 in free groceries a month and spending 280 (70 *4) hours a month to do it, that means that you're pretty much earning $3.50 an hour. Contrast that with getting a second full-time job (40 hours per week) at federal minimum wage ($7.25) and you'll make $1160 per month (ignoring, of course, taxes and the like). Some people viewed it as a hobby, but a 70 hour per week hobby is still excessive.

Third, it was disrupting the lives of their family. (All but one person profiled were married, most had kids...including one parent who stored 1400 rolls of toilet paper under her 2 year old's bed.) I'm sure the families benefited and most of them were supportive enough, but I didn't really see anyone who shared the couponer's passion for the hobby.

Fourth, how much were they really saving? Yes, they were walking out with $1000 of groceries for $100, but if not for the coupons, would they really have bought $1,000 of groceries? It seemed like they weren't buying what they needed or would use, but getting as much as they could get for as little as possible. One description referred to them as "shopaholics" and I think it really was yet another example of over-consumption, just at a very low price.

And finally, their behavior. In a couple of cases, they seemed ashamed of how much their stockpile had taken over their lives. Other times, the couponer would be visibly worried at the checkout, worrying that she had made a mistake in her calculations and would have to actually pay for hundreds of dollars of groceries or seemed extremely stressed that the store wasn't equipped for their kind of shopping. (In two separate cases, the register locked up because the shopper had hit either an item or total limit.)

I realize these people were handpicked for human interest and so probably don't represent even the people who use coupons that aggressively, so I'm not making judgments about extreme couponers as a whole, but for those people? As much as I love saving money and as much as I agreed with some of their general principals, I couldn't relate to most of them and I didn't view them as models of frugality. In fact, I think a lot of them were anything but frugal when it came to their shopping habits. And, possibly more significantly, despite the fact that most of them were very vocal about what they saved, they seemed just as obsessed and worried over finances as someone who had $50,000 in debt. So if they intended to use coupons as a way to improve their financial security, I think they're missing the point of financial security.

Anyway, this is all a long and convoluted way of saying that I agree with what most people are saying: The show is fascinating and I love any show that lets me look at it and pat myself on my back for my moderation and perspective, but I just can't imagine living like that.