Strategy #4 – Buy Multiples of Items
One of the things people think about when you mention Extreme Couponing is the Massive Amounts of Items that Extreme Couponers have on hand. On TV you don’t just see 1 tube of toothpaste you see 20, 60 or even 100. Now, I’m not telling you to go Crazy I think 30 is a little excessive but buying multiples of an item when it’s on sale and you have a coupon is one of the best methods to saving money long term.
Every item has what we call a Price Life Cycle. This means that there’s a High Price Point for an Item and a Low Price Point for an item. The time span between the highest price and the lowest price is called the life cycle.
A sales cycle is the amount of time it takes for a product to go from its lowest price point back around to the lowest price point. For most products this is between 8-10 weeks however this may be longer or shorter depending on the competition between grocery stores in your area.
One of the best ways to save money on items like Beef, Produce, Eggs, and Dairy is by tracking the local sales cycles in your area. You can save as much as 50% just by paying attention to the highest and lowest price points and buying when a product hits the bottom of the sales cycle.
Let’s just take one example for a minute. Let’s say you are purchasing ground beef. The highest price point might be $3.99 but the average sale might be $2.89, however there is probably a time where you can find this for as much as $1.99 which is a 50% Savings! By buying multiples of an item when it reaches the lowest price point you can save more money!
This is exactly what extreme couponers do, they wait for a product to hit it’s lowest price (Typically it’s on sale and they have a coupon or special promotion) then they stock up to last them a long time so they don’t have to pay the full price of an item.
Knowing How Much to Buy:
The hardest part of buying multiples of an item is knowing how much to buy. If you have a large chest freezer you can purchase and store meat in the freezer, if you don’t have a large freezer you have to take space into consideration.
The Shelf Life of a Product is also something to keep in mind. You don’t want to purchase more than you can use before it goes bad.
My General Rule of Thumb is I want enough to last me to the next Lowest Price Point in the Product Life Cycle.
So if in the example above you’re finding meat on sale for $1.99 every 8 weeks, you need about enough to last you 2 months to avoid having to pay full price! So track the prices on the items you buy most and you’ll quickly see how fast they go back down to their lowest price and that will let you know how much you need to buy at a time.
Don’t Forget: You can Download the Stockpiling Price Sheet to see all of the estimated prices you could expect to pay for the basic items we buy each month. There is also a place to compare unit pricing. This is just a guide, but a great way to help you learn the prices of each item.
Tomorrow we will be talking about another strategy for getting the most out of your coupons!
Make sure you check out our Saving Money Blog and also our How to Coupon Page for more tips, tricks and videos on saving money and using coupons.
View all the posts in the Extreme Couponing Strategies series.
