I’ve officially hit my two month mark since I’ve started to coupon and find the best money saving deals so I can start saving money while I’m on unemployment. Two months ago, this basement was just a spare room full of random stuff that collected dust. After my boyfriend cleaned out the room, he bought the shelves and put them together so I could start my couponing adventure. As you can see, the shelves and the room is starting to get very full! Like all the soft soap? Well.. I paid NOTHING for it!

The majority of the stuff you see here is a mix between freebies, cheap deals and some awesome Amazon deals I was able to snag. My first really good deal was on toilet paper and I spent $23.73 for 3 – 20/Pack’s on Charmin toilet paper. Since then, I’ve learned how to lessen my out of pocket expenses by as much as 91% and up when I go shopping which requires a lot of advanced planning. A few weeks ago, I bought 6 packs of Charmin Toilet Paper for $0.18 while I was taking advantage of the Cover Girl moneymaker at CVS. I was lucky enough to have my first newspapers while starting out couponing have the high value $8/2 Cover Girl face products coupons, and I thought it was valuable enough to purchase more on Ebay. Good thing I did, because I was able to recycle over $150 worth of gift cards (on my CVS card, my BF’s and another) CVS using those coupons and paying NOTHING for Cover Girl makeup. On top of that, many of my friends and family now have some free high quality makeup and won’t need any for a long time. I’ve even been able to pay $0.10 for 5 boxes of Puffs tissues, and we’re just on our last box now!

The key to couponing is pairing a manufactuers coupon, with a store coupon and then waiting for a good sale. If I would have went and bought Listerine with just my $1/1 manufacturer’s coupon, I would have only paid a $1 off the original price. But since I waited and was able to pair it with a $1/1 Target coupon and a clearance sale, I only ended up paying $1.24 per bottle, PLUS they also had more coupons on them AND now we have some FREE travel size Listerine for when we go on vacation. And most of the stuff you see on the left – was FREE!

You can do this. Look where we’re at now compared to only two months ago. If I would have paid for everything out of pocket at it’s regular price, I wouldn’t even have half of this stuff stocked up. We now have enough toilet paper to last us over a year, plus enough Listerine to last us as long as two years and none of those products go bad. On top of it, since I took advantage of purchasing some  $4/1 Purina One Beyond coupons on ebay, we were able to pair them with a sale and we saved over $150 on dog food that will now last us 3 months for our four dogs. All I paid was less than $4 on ebay to save $150+ worth of dog food and it was worth it!