I heart coupons!

After we moved to Maryland, I was blessed with a HUGE assortment of grocery stores.  In Kentucky, we had just one...a Super WalMart.  And that's where we did *all* of our shopping.  So moving to MD was so exciting!  We did our grocery shopping at Giant Eagle where we'd earn $0.20 off of each gallon of gas for every $50 we'd spend and at the gas station, we'd earn 1% off of our groceries for every 20 gallons of gas we'd pump.  So we really earned a lot of benefits!  And Giant Eagle doubled all my coupons up to $0.99!  I became a coupon queen!  I'd been couponing a little before Maryland, but after I realized how amazing Giant Eagle was...I was hooked on coupons.

And then we moved to North Carolina.  And my coupon dreams crumbled.  :)  We are so blessed to have a brand new Food Lion about a mile from the house.  It was just built last summer and while it's not huge (read: lacks some variety), it's so nice to have a decent grocery store so close.  But Food Lion doesn't double coupons.  And because they don't have the variety of larger grocery stores, I have lots of coupons that don't get used.  

I could shop at a bigger grocery store up in Sanford that I found online that looks super great, and doubles coupons, but it's nearly 40 minutes away since it's on the north side of town.  Driving so much with gas so expensive would quickly cancel out any grocery savings.  Darn it.  

I miss couponing.  I miss the excitement of saving money.  I recently signed up through a really great company to get my coupons delivered to me in bulk once per month.  This saves the huge hassle of trying to find the newspaper on Sunday.  It seems the Sanford paper doesn't carry all of the inserts and neither does Fayetteville...so I have to find the Raleigh paper and they seem to sell out and/or aren't carried in my closest gas stations.  Plus, it gives me coupons that are better in value than I would get just buying my local paper.  

Tonight, I went through 6 weeks of coupon inserts and cut out the ones I'd need.  I still have to sort through them and organize them in my binder, but it definitely reinvigorated my love for my q's and I'm hoping that I can get better at using them...even if I won't be saving quite as much money as I was before.  :)