Use Your Coupon Savings

When I was very first looking up info about couponing, I found this great website called Couponing to Disney. There, she explains how she uses her coupon savings and found money to fund her family's annual trip to Disney World. Awesome, right?!

So I came up with a plan of my own. I decided to use my coupon savings to make extra student loan payments and extra deposits into my savings account. Click here to see my first post detailing my savings.

WHAT DO YOU WANT? You can use your coupon savings to save up for your own vacation...or to buy some new clothes...or buy a new jungle gym for your cat...or use it to pay the dentist to pull that tooth that's bothering you...or WHATEVER YOU WANT!

So, how do you use your coupon savings to do anything from funding vacations to making extra debt payments? You keep a record! I know it sounds all drab and boring, but it's really worth it.

Specifically, what do you do?

1. Create an Excel spreadsheet. Or you can even use pencil and paper. You're going to keep track of all of your coupon savings, sale savings, and found money.  If you need help with this, just let me know.
2. Save all of your receipts. Especially when you use coupons. Most receipts will tell you how much you saved at the bottom. Put this in your spreadsheet. You can be as detailed as you want. In my spreadsheet, I have a column for date, description, amount saved, and balance. Each receipt gets it's own line in my spreadsheet.
3. FOUND MONEY? This means any money or income that is unexpected or extra. That includes bonuses at work, gift cards, cash gifts, redemptions from Swagbucks/ibotta/Plink, etc. Basically, if you didn't budget to receive this income, it's going into your spreadsheet.
4. By the way, if you don't have a written budget, you need to write it down pronto! 
5. Now, you need to earmark that money in some way. I just keep track of the amount I have saved in my spreadsheet and then I move that amount into my savings account or use it to make an extra debt payment.

See? Not that hard.

Oh, and I gotta say this: Do not rely on using only your coupon savings as your sole source of paying off debt. This is a bad thing. It's not recommended because it's so variable and unstable. I do NOT do that. My student loan payments are already budgeted into my budget (budget budget budget). I make my regular payments regardless of whether I coupon in any given month. I use my coupons savings to make an extra payment against the principal in addition to my regular payment. This is a good thing.