Last week my old girl and I stopped at a local chain restaurant for a quick lunch on our way to an appointment. We were kind of shocked at the price, but then we realized that it was the first time that we had paid full price for a lunch in the last three months. Usually we only eat lunch at places where we have a “buy one, get one” (BOGO) coupon. There are a variety of ways to get BOGO coupons, but we get most of ours from coupon books.
The schools in our area sell coupon books as a fund raiser. They usually cost ten or twenty bucks and we buy one or two a year from the neighborhood kids just to help out the schools. In the past we often forgot that we had them until they expired or maybe we used them once or twice to get a sundae at Baskin-Robbins or something like that, but mostly we just considered them to be a donation to the school. We happened to discuss this subject with a couple of friends last year who told us that every year they send away for a coupon book that is filled with BOGO coupons and other discounts for businesses in our area and that they keep track of what they save. We were surprised to learn that they had saved several hundred dollars with the coupon book over the last six months. A few days after we had that discussion our grandson called to ask if we would buy a coupon book from his school for $20. We did that and decided that we would be conscientious about using it and keeping track of the money we saved.
We got the book in the middle of November. About two weeks after we got it we took a couple of our grandkids to a miniature golf course and, using a pair of BOGO coupons, we saved ten dollars. That was half the cost of the coupon book. By the end of the year we had saved over $50, or two and a half times what we paid for the book.
My wife and I liked the savings that we got from the coupon book our grandson sold us so much that we decided to buy the book that our friends use. We ordered that one over the Internet for $45 and got it in mid-April of this year. In the first four months we've had it we've saved $137 over and above the cost of the book, and we have only used it for lunches and an occasional frozen yogurt. We would have saved even more if we had used it for any of the other goods and services that are available.
We like using the coupon books for more than the ability to save money though. One of the things we like to do is to eat lunch at one-off cafes and mom and pop restaurants. A lot of the coupons in our books are for places like that. Because we have the coupons, we try restaurants that we wouldn't even have known existed if it weren't for the books. Some of them have been disappointments, but a lot of them have turned out to be great places, and the best thing is that it costs us very little to try them.
Coupon books aren't the only place to get good BOGO coupons. For example, there is an advertising service in our area that sends out coupons about once a month. Ninety percent of them are for things that don't interest us, but there are always a few good restaurant coupons in the packet. We save those and use them before they expire in a month or six weeks from the time we receive the packet.
Another good source of coupons is local papers, especially those that are basically advertising vehicles that are offered for free. There is a monthly paper like that in our area which publishes different editions for each section of the large metropolitan area in which we live. The back section of the paper is nothing but ads and coupons. Each edition contains coupons for the section of the metro area that it covers. We get the paper for the section in which we live, so we get coupons for local businesses from there. To get coupons for businesses in other sections of the metro area, we go to libraries in those sections. Most of them have copies of the paper which anyone is free to take. We pick up one for the section where the library lives and get the coupons for the businesses in that section.
When you are living on a fixed income, any kind of discount is a good one. You have to be careful, however, to read the fine print, especially when using coupon books that require you to register or fill out an application. E.g., I have heard rumors of coupon providers that sell the first year's subscription for one of their books for a low price and then automatically renew the user for the next year at a much higher price. It is also possible that online coupons can be used to gather personal information for identity theft. I am personally very leery of coupon offers that arrive in email, even those forwarded by friends. To date my wife and I have experienced no problems with the coupon books we have used except for businesses that have turned belly up before we got around to using the coupon, and in a couple of cases even before the coupon book arrived. Two of the books we have used can be found at http://www.entertainment.com and http://www.diningandshopping.net .
No comments:
Post a Comment