How I'm doing: January Savings

Starting January 1, I put my receipts into a spreadsheet to keep track of how much I have been saving. I tried to include ALL purchases, even gas and mall purchases. I didn't count family restaurant trips (we're not planning to stop those). I'm having a little trouble getting receipts from one family member, so my numbers are a little off. Also, I could only include the transactions I was aware of. I still think I'll be able to make my goal of 50% savings over this year.

Due to privacy, I won't give the exact numbers. But, I spent only $33 than the amount of coupons I used. So, I saved almost 23% using coupons alone. By shopping with sales, I was able to save an additional 53%. In total, I saved approximately 75.89% on all my and my family's purchases in January.

Combining coupons and sales has been so great for me and my family. We've been able to help our friends and donate to charity. Saving so much has also helped with our stress; there's no worry about running out of food or money before the month ends. I hope the rest of this year continues this trend.

The importance of keeping track

When you first start saving lots of money, it's easy to forget to keep track of your savings and spending.  The adrenaline is rushing and you get focused on the thrill of the deal.  It can be easy to actually overspend when you first start couponing.  Some people rush to build a stockpile, and others go after every deal even if they don't need/want the item. Keeping track of your money helps you avoid the overspending, hopefully before it becomes a major problem.

With the start of a new year, I began keeping track of our spending and saving in a spreadsheet.  There is no need for anything fancy; a simple spreadsheet in Excel (or a free alternative) will do just fine. I'm also keeping all the receipts just in case.

So far, it's going pretty well. A couple of receipts have accidentally gotten thrown away, but I don't expect that to be a common occurrence. Keeping track also helped point out problem areas where we still need to cut back and helped curb some of the impulse shopping. It's also nice to show the naysayers how much you can save with just a few "scraps of paper".

Keeping track is also a great confidence booster; we've already saved over 90% just in the first 9 days of the year.  Without the spreadsheet, I would have guessed it would be more like 60%. I think we're well on our way to saving over 50% on our purchases this year!

If you're not already keeping track, please consider doing so. You never know what you'll find out!

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