As a personal finance columnist, I am supposed to advise you to clip coupons to save money. The truth is, it may not be worth your time.
Whether clipping grocery coupons will save you enough to compensate you for the time it takes to organize them depends upon your shopping habits and, even more, on what you buy.
Brett Arends of The Wall Street Journal recently wrote an article in which he claimed you could make $108 to $123 per hour clipping coupons, depending upon your marginal tax rate. (Coupon savings are tax-free income.) His calculation was based on a study that found the average coupon was worth $1.44 and the estimation that it takes one minute to clip each one.
That average value seems awfully high, but even if you accept it, Arends failed to take into account the amount of time it would take to find coupons worth $86.40 (the before-tax value of 60 minutes of clipping coupons worth $1.44 each) for products you actually wanted to buy.
Monitoring buy-one-get-one-free deals at supermarkets, buying store brands and/or shopping at warehouse clubs may yield far more savings.
If you do decide to clip coupons, remember to hold on to them for a month or so and try to link them up with store sales. If there are products you buy often, check the manufacturer’s website for coupons, too.
I tried clipping coupons for a few months, but it didn’t yield much in savings for my one-person household. I did, however, find looking at the coupon supplements worthwhile. Every once in a while, I found a high-value coupon, such as $2 off at Pet Supermarket, that worked for me.
So I’ll advise you to take a look at the coupon supplements in the Sunday paper and see whether clipping coupons can save you money. It might.
If it doesn’t, you can quit feeling guilty.
