Coupons, coupons, coupons. Gotta love those savings… right?
It’s a safe bet that most of us who read this blog love coupons. We routinely check our newspapers for special offers, and we refuse to make purchases without searching for discounts because we are very careful with our personal finance. I like coupons and saving as much as the next guy, but lately I have been feeling the effects of coupon invasion.
It’s actually a pretty ingenious move on the part of the retailers: give the customer a coupon at checkout for their next purchase and you can almost guarantee that they’ll be back. Even better, ask for their email and mailing addresses and send them MORE coupons. With so many excuses to return to the store, the casual visitor becomes a regular customer in no time.
The problem is, we don’t always need to spend. However, we tend to feel great if we think we are saving, and we tend to feel terrible if we think we are wasting, which is precisely why we find it hard to let a bonus coupon go unused, no matter how little intention we had of buying anything in the first place.
Can you tell I’m trying to make myself feel better by using the collective “we” instead of admitting that this is an “I-me-mine” problem? But I’m sure there must be others out there who have fallen into the cycle of coupons and found themselves returning to the store three weeks later to buy a second sweater just because they could save 30% on it. So, I offer the following tips for avoiding extra spending when you really don’t need anything else:
- Throw the coupon away.
- If throwing it away is too hard because you can’t stomach the idea of throwing away savings, give the coupon to a friend (but only if your friend really needs it, of course!).
- If you know that you’ll be too tempted by the coupons that arrive in your e-mail or mailbox, don’t give the store your contact information. You’ll still be able to seek out coupons if you really want them, and you might like having less junk mail.
- Remember your budget. In the three weeks between now and the time you can use the second coupon, you’ll have plenty of time to study your budget and determine whether or not this is a purchase that you really need to make.
I’m confident that all of us (myself included) will do a great job of avoiding overspending due to extra coupons as long as we stop and think about what we are doing. If after some consideration and we can still use that bonus coupon, we can truly jump for joy. Yay for frugality!
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