Anyone that wants to make the most of grocery coupons needs to know when the grocery coupon inserts will be in the Sunday newspapers. The following shows the Smart Source 2012 coupon insert schedule, the Red Plum 2012 coupon insert schedule. There are also special coupon inserts from general Mills and Proctor & Gamble that are included from time to time. The 2012 General Mills coupon insert schedule as well as the 2012 Procter & Gamble coupon insert schedule have also been included. Smart Source and Red Plum will sometimes includes two inserts in the Sunday newspaper. When this occurs, it will be marked as Smart Source (2) or Red Plum (2) below.

Grocery coupon insert schedules can change from time to time, so if you become aware of any changes, please take the time to contact us so that we can keep this coupon insert schedule up to date. We will add the 2013 Coupon Insert Schedule when it becomes available:

January

January 1 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source (2), Procter & Gamble
January 8 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source
January 15 coupon inserts: Smart Source
January 22 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source
January 29 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source

February

February 5 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source, Procter & Gamble
February 12 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source (2)
February 19 coupon inserts: Red Plum
February 26 coupon inserts: Smart Source (2)

March

March 4 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source, Procter & Gamble
March 11 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source
March 18 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source
March 25 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source

April

April 1 coupon inserts: Red Plum (2), Smart Source (2), Procter & Gamble
April 8 coupon inserts: No Inserts Scheduled
April 15 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source
April 22 coupon inserts: Smart Source
April 29 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source

May

May 6 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source, Procter & Gamble
May 13 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source
May 20 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source
May 27 coupon inserts: Memorial Day (No Inserts Scheduled)

June

June 3 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source, Procter & Gamble
June 10 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source
June 17 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source
June 24 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source

July

July 1 coupon inserts: Independence Day (No Inserts Scheduled)
Juyl 8 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source, Procter & Gamble
July 15 coupon inserts: Smart Source
July 22 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source
July 29 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source

August

August 5 coupon inserts: Red Plum (2), Smart Source
August 12 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source
August 19 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source
August 26 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source

September

September 2 coupon inserts: Labor Day (No Inserts Scheduled)
September 9 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source (2)
September 16 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source
September 23 coupon inserts: Smart Source
September 30 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source

October

October 7 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source (2), Procter & Gamble
October 14 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source
October 21 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source
October 28 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source

November

November 4 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source, Procter & Gamble
November 11 coupon inserts: Red Plum (2), Smart Source
November 18 : Smart Source
November 25 coupon inserts: Thanksgiving (No Inserts Scheduled)

December

December 2 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source, Procter & Gamble
December 9 coupon inserts: Red Plum, Smart Source
December 16 coupon inserts: Smart Source
December 23 coupon inserts: Christmas (No Inserts Scheduled)
December 30 coupon inserts: New Year (No Inserts Scheduled)

Note: The 2013 Grocery Coupon Insert Schedule will be posted as soon as it becomes available.

When you first begin couponing, and while you are still building up a stockpile of food, there are going to be times when you need to buy food that isn’t on sale. The question becomes how do you find the coupons for these products if you haven’t clipped, sorted and organized all the coupons from the Sunday newspaper coupon inserts? Fortunately, the Internet once again provides us with a way of efficiently finding these coupons without spending hours developing a dreaded coupon organizational system. The answer comes in the form of a coupon database.

A coupon database is basically a database of all the coupons available from the major coupon sources (Sunday newspaper inserts, online coupons, etc.) All you need to do is take your grocery shopping list and input each item into the coupon database. Once input, you’ll receive a list of available coupons for the specific product entered and where each coupon can be found. Then you either print the coupon from your computer if it’s available on the Internet, or go to your Sunday newspaper coupon inserts and clip it from the insert indicated. While this will not save you as much as stacking coupons with sales, it does mean that you can still save some money when you need to purchase something even when it isn’t on sale.

The coupon database is also a huge time saver if you happen to shop at a grocery store that is not covered by a blogger who matches sales and coupons for you. Instead of going through months of Sunday newspapers coupon inserts and all the latest online coupons to see if there are any matches, you can input the weekly sale items at your local grocery store into the coupon database to see if there are any coupon stacking opportunities. This is exactly how the coupon bloggers that list all the deals each week do it.

If you have any questions about how to match coupons to your weekly grocery list items that happen not to be on sale, please feel free to leave a comment below. This post is part of the Lazy Couponing series. The next step will be how to begin shopping for coupon deals.

Now that you have your weekly Sunday newspaper inserts which you have been collecting and you know how coupon stacking works, you’re faced with the task of matching the coupons that you have to the sales that the grocery store is having. While it’s certainly possible for you to go through the grocery store circular when it arrives at your door and flip through all the newspaper inserts that you have collected to match the coupons to the sales, you’d end up spending far more time than I would ever be willing to spend to try and find these deals. Since I am all about making this process as absolutely painless as possible, I simply let others do the work for me (and you should too).

Although I would rather go to a dentist and have a cavity filled with no novacaine then spend my time trying to match coupons to store sales, there are people who actually enjoy doing this. Don’t even bother questioning why and just be thankful that there are. Even better, they’re willing to share what they find so you don’t have to do any of the work yourself.

On Grocery Coupon Guide you can see the weekly coupon and sale matches for Safeway and Albertsons thanks to Niki (you can also see the matches for the drugstores CVS and Walgreens which we will talk about later). If you shop at another grocery store that is of any decent size, there should be a blog out there that matches the coupons and store sales each week. Simply follow that blog and you will know the best coupon and sale match-up deals each week so you can stock up on those items.

The great thing about the blogs that match sales with coupons is that they will tell you exactly where you can find the coupon. For example, you can see here that the coupons online which you can print have a link to them. The last one for Lysol Cleaners says that the coupon is available in the 4/17 SmartSource newspaper insert. You simply go to that newspaper insert on your shelf and cut out the coupon from it.

This is why it’s not necessary to even look at the coupons in the Sunday newspaper inserts. As long as you have dated the Sunday inserts so they are easy to find, the only time you need to look in them is when a match occurs with a sale. You can then clip the coupon right then and there and take it with you on your next shopping trip. This way there is no need for clipping, sorting and organizing all the coupons each week (or dragging a huge coupon folder with you to the grocery store), and the hours it would take to do so.

If you have any questions about how to match coupons to the sales at grocery stores, please leave a comment below and I’ll do my best to answer. This post is part of the Lazy Couponing series. The next step will be learning about how to find coupons for products on your weekly shopping list that aren’t on sale.

If you are like me and greatly enjoy our National Parks (I also love our State Parks), there is a great way to help them out at no additional cost to you over the next six months. From May 1st – October 31st Nature Valley is helping to raise up to a half million dollars to help preserve US National Parks. Nature Valley is donating $400,000 to the National Parks Conservation Association.

In addition, Nature Valley will be donating up to $100,000 more through consumer participation. If you purchase a specially marked box of Nature Valley granola bars, you can input the barcode at NatureValley.com (beginning May 1) and $0.10 will be donated to the National Parks Conservation Association. They will continue to make the $0.10 donations up to $100,000. You can enter the barcode once a day.

Since Nature Valley granola bars can usually can be purchased for pennies on the dollar when you combine manufacturer coupons and Catalina coupons (Nature Valley runs Catalina coupons on a regular basis), there should be an opportunity for you to make donations to this cause while getting the boxes for far under regualr retail value. It’s definitely worthwhile to keep your eyes open for these boxes to not only get a good deal, but to help our National Parks in the process.

Now that you know the different types of coupons out there and how to stack coupons, your initial urge will be to go full steam into couponing and try to look for the best deals each week at every store in your area. Resist this urge. Seriously. As I mentioned at the beginning, you want to take the first month to practice. The best way to practice is to choose a single grocery store you feel comfortable with to start using the techniques you have learned.

While each store usually handles coupons a bit differently, the basics are all pretty much the same. By choosing a single store to begin with, you will build up confidence so that expanding to other grocery stores at a later date will pose little difficulty. If you try to coupon at a bunch of different stores before you become comfortable on how coupons work, you are going to become frustrated and give up (or make the entire learning process a whole lot less fun).

For most people, you’ll probably want to opt for the store with which you are most familiar, and where you do most of your grocery shopping. The one big exception to this will be if you have a store nearby that doubles coupons and your regular grocery store doesn’t. If you do most of your shopping at a small, local grocery store, you might also want to opt for a larger grocery store chain to do your initial coupon practice. This is mainly because it will take less time and effort to match coupons to deals at the larger chain grocery stores than at the smaller local grocery stores.

Once you have chosen a grocery store where you are going to practice your couponing skills, go online to see if the store has a coupon policy. If the store does have a written coupon policy, print it out. This is something that you will want to bring with you on every shopping trip you make no matter how experienced you become. You will learn quite quickly that some employees have no idea what the coupon policy for their store is and it won’t take long before you will know how coupons work better than most grocery store employees. If the store where you will be practicing your couponing skills doesn’t have a written coupon policy, take the time to talk with the manager of the store to learn the store’s particular coupon policies.

If you have any questions about picking the initial grocery store where you will begin practicing what you learn, please feel free to leave a comment below and I will do my best to answer. This post is part of the Lazy Couponing series. The next step will be learning about how to match coupons to sales.

The conventional wisdom is that if you’re going to save a lot of money with coupons, you have to live in an area where grocery stores offer double coupons. While it’s certainly easier to find many more food deals when you have stores that will double coupons, double coupon grocery stores aren’t necessary in order to save a lot of money. I can confirm this because live in an area where stores don’t double coupons, yet I was still able to eat well for 100 days on less than $1.00 dollar a day. I managed to serve a Thanksgiving meal for six while spending less than $1.00 total. I have purchased over $20,000 worth of food for less than $500 out-of-pocket all from grocery stores that don’t double coupons. here is a list of stores that double coupons so you can see if any in your area do.

The concept of doubling coupons is pretty basic. The grocery store will double the amount of a manufacturer coupon that you give to them (usually up to a certain amount) so that the coupons that you use are twice as valuable. For example, if you have a $1.00 off 1 coupon for cereal and the cereal costs $5.00, the store will double coupon to $2.00 off and you will only pay $3.00 for the cereal.

Double coupons get a little more complicated when the grocery store has limitations on up to a certain amount they double coupons. Different grocery stores will interpret the meaning a little differently, so if you ever have a question about how your store doubles coupons, you should go to your local grocery store manager for clarification. For example, if a store doubles coupons up to $.50, a grocery store might do the $1.00 off 1 cereal coupon above in one of two ways. First, it might give you a $1.50 off of your purchase. In this case, the store is doubling any coupon that you give it up to $0.50. Another way that a store might do the transaction is that they may only take off $1.00 on your purchase. In this instance, the store will only double coupons that have a value from $0 .01 – $0.50, but do not double any coupons above $0.50. Unfortunately, it just depends on how the particular grocery store interpret their wording on the way that they will do it.

Another issue is coupons that say “do not double” on them. This wording is there basically to let the grocery stores know that if they do double the coupon, the manufacturer won’t reimburse any more than the face value. Many grocery stores, however, will not double coupons that have this wording even though there is no difference for the store whether these words are on a coupon or not. What it does do is save the store a great amount of money since they can reject doubling these coupons. Again, it is up to each store to determine whether they will accept to double the coupons marked as “do not double” and you need to talk with your local grocery store manager to find out the rules at your store.

Grocery stores doubled coupons as an incentive to drive traffic into the grocery store. When the store decides to double the amount on the coupon, it’s the same as the store discounting the item by the amount that they double. The manufacturer will reimburse the grocery store for the face value of the coupon, but the store ends up having to pay for the amount that they double the coupon.

If you are one of the lucky ones that lives in an area where grocery stores do double coupons, you should be able to find many more deals and a lot more instances where you can get food for free. If you are like most of us and don’t live in an area where there aren’t double coupons, this is not something that should cause you any despair. There will still be plenty of opportunities to get good deals on food, they just won’t be quite as frequent. The one thing that you need to understand is that while having grocery stores that double coupons is a great benefit, it’s not essential in order to get good deals using coupons.

If you have any questions about double coupons, please feel free to leave a comment and I will do my best to answer them. This post is part of the Lazy Couponing series. The next step will be learning about picking a grocery store.

Now that you are familiar with the different types of coupons (manufacturer coupons, store coupons, Catalina coupons, instant rebates, product rebates, eCoupons) that are out there, it is important to learn how to stack the different coupons and discount promotions. Stacking is using a coupon in conjunction with a sale and/or in conjunction with other discounts. In other words, your stack discounts on top of one another. It is the process of stacking which will allow you to get food at a greatly discounted price.

To male stacking most effective, you usually want to wait for the grocery store to have the item that you are planning to buy on sale. In this way you are starting out at a low price already and then adding more discounts on top of that sale price to get really great deals.

The reality is that in the vast majority of cases you are only going to be able to stack two of the above together. The most common scenario will be when you will be able to stack a sale price with a manufacturer coupon. There will, however, be occasions when you will be able to stack three or more of the above together. It’s with these opportunities where you can save a lot of money. The more discounts that you can stack together, the bigger your savings will be.

A good example of this is cereal. I have never purchased a box of cereal for more than one dollar since I started couponing. Usually I can get a box of cereal for $.50 or less, and often times for free. On a rare occasion, I have actually been paid to buy cereal.

Example: there is a box of cereal that you like that have the normal retail price of $5.00. Most people will end up buying the box of cereal when they are about to run out and that means that they will likely pay the normal retail price of $5.00. If you wait until it goes on sale, you can often get cereal for 50% off which would bring down the price to $2.50. If you happen to have a manufacturer coupon for $1.00 off 1 when the sale takes place, the price would then be $1.50. If there happens to be a Catalina coupon running for $4.00 off when you buy 4, you can now buy four boxes for $2.00, or $0.50 each. Then if there is a product rebate of $4.00 when you buy 4, you actually will make money buying the cereal.

As you can see from the above, the more discounts you are able to stack, the greater the savings. Again, in most cases you are only going to be able to stack two together (a sale and a manufacturer coupon), but there will be occasions when the grocery store stars will align and you will be able to stack more.

Again, this is why it’s so important to change the way that you grocery shop. If you have a stockpile of food you can use to plan your meals, you can always buy food when it goes on sale and you’ll have the opportunity to stack these other discounts together. If you don’t have a stockpile of food, you end up having to buy the food when you need it which it’ll likely mean that it will be at its normal retail price and the first key to stacking (the sale price) isn’t available.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask and I will do my best to answer them. This post is part of the Lazy Couponing series. The next step will be learning about Double Coupons.

Electronic coupons (usually referred to as eCoupons) are coupons that you get on the Internet and load directly onto your grocery store’s shopping card. The main advantage of eCoupons is that there is no clipping and organizing involved when you use them. You simply chose them on a website and they are loaded onto your grocery store card.

There are two main eCoupon websites: ShortCuts.com and CellFire.com. Grocery stores have also recently started to create their own electronic coupon database where you can load the eCoupons onto your store card directly from the grocery store’s website. The savings from these coupons will be taken off automatically when you swipe your grocery store card at the cash register so there is nothing you have to do once you have loaded the coupons onto the card.

eCoupons used to be a wonderful way to get great deals, but that is quickly changing. When they first appeared, the eCoupon was considered a separate coupon so you could stack both a manufacturer coupon and an eCoupon on a single product. There are still some stores that allow this, and this is how the transaction would work if your store does:

Example: There is a brand of crackers on sale for $2.50 at the grocery store. You have a manufacturer coupon for $1.00 off 1 package. You also have a store coupon for $0.50 off 1 package. Then you have loaded a $0.50 off 1 eCoupon onto your card from the ShortCuts website. In this case, you can use both the coupons and the eCoupon will automatically come off the crackers when you swipe your store card. The final price would be $0.50 ($2.50 – $1.00 manufacturer coupon – $0.50 store coupon – $0.50 eCoupon that automatically comes off = $0.50)

Unfortunately, many grocery stores (including Safeway recently) are moving toward making it so you can only use a manufacturer coupon or an eCoupon, but not both.

Example: There is a brand of crackers on sale for $2.50 at the grocery store. You have a manufacturer coupon for $1.00 off 1 package. You also have a store coupon for $0.50 off 1 package. Then you have loaded a $0.50 off 1 eCoupon onto your grocery store card. In this case, you can use the store coupon and the eCoupon will automatically come off the crackers when you swipe your store card, but the manufacturer coupon will be disallowed (it will make the cash register beep when the cashier tries to swipe the barcode). The final price would be $1.50 ($2.50 – $0.50 store coupon – $0.50 eCoupon that automatically comes off = $1.50)

While eCoupon are easier, they can also cost you money. The eCoupon will trump any hand held manufacturer coupon you may have since it is taken first. In the above example, it would have been better to use the $1.00 off manufacturer coupon, but the eCoupon came off first when your store card was swiped and trumped it. This makes using eCoupons more complicated to use and you have to think through whether or not it makes sense to use them.

While I used to use eCoupons all the time, I don’t use them nearly as much now that they can’t be stacked with manufacturer coupons at the grocery stores I frequent. I find that in most cases I am able to find manufacturer coupons that has a higher value than the eCoupons that are available.

Please feel free to ask any questions that you may have about eCoupons and I will do my best to answer them. This post is part of the Lazy Couponing series. The next step will be learning about Stacking Coupons.

Don’t be surprised if you see more consumer goods available on Groupon in the near future at more than 50% off. Today General Mills became the first major consumer product company to test the daily-deal site where they offered 4,500 packages and the deal sold out quickly (it was only available in San Francisco and Minneapolis).

General Mills offered 12 General Mills products for $20.00, a discount of more than 50% off the regular retail price. In addition, the deal included a $15.00 coupon book for General Mills products. The entire package was to be delivered to buyers’ homes and included the following items:

• 12.8 ounce Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal
• 13 ounce Reese’s Puffs cereal
• 12 ounce Kix cereal
• 12.8 ounce Cascadian Farms Organic cereal
• 5.8 ounce Fiber One 90-Calorie Chewy Bars
• 5.8 ounce Hamburger Helper
• 11 ounce Green Giant Corn Niblets
• 9.5 ounce Old El Paso Tortilla Stuffers
• 5 ounce Fruit Roll-Ups
• 10.5 ounce Chex Mix Muddy Buddies snack mix
• 17.5 ounce Betty Crocker Sugar Cookie mix
• 13.7 ounce Wanchai Ferry Orange Chicken dinner kit

So is it a good deal? For those that do not coupon, it certainly is. Not only do you get the food at 50% off, it is delivered directly to your door so there is nothing that you really have to do. For those that coupon, however, it probably isn’t that great of a deal. Even those that don’t extreme coupon, getting food for 50% is fairly easy and you get to buy exactly what you want. There is undoubtedly food in this package that are not regular items on the purchaser’s regular grocery list which wouldn’t be purchased on a normal shopping trip. That being said, I would expect to see many more deals like this on Groupon in the future.

The next time you are in the produce section at Safeway, take a look around for the current monthly issue of Fresh Ideas magazine. While the coupons I have found in this monthly 8 page paper probably won’t get you any food for free, the coupons are often for food that you often don’t see coupons for elsewhere. The February issue has the following 4 coupons:

$1.00 off 1 Mann’s vegetable party trays
$1.00 off 1 Bella Sun Luci sun dried tomatoes
$0.50 off 1 Garden Highway stuffed mushrooms
$1.00 off 1 Bolthouse or Bom Dia 32 oz beverages

It is definitely worth taking the time to look to see if any of the coupons happen to be for food that you already purchase.