Smart Shopping

How you spend your money is very important. It's the key behind a successful budget. You'll need to lay out a plan and stick with it. Any adjustments you need to make would only be to pay essential bills like the utilities, not to have more to go out for dinner and a movie. You'll need to re-evaluate your priorities and make some tough cuts.

But when it comes to shopping, you'll also need to be smart about how and where and when you spend your money. There are specific tricks you can use to save yourself a fortune over the course of a year. The more of them you can use the better off you'll be. Plus I always feel a bit superior everytime I get a great deal. I'm a frugal control freak. What can I say?

Coupons

Using coupons is the no-brainer, obvious solution. However, there are some aspects of this that many people don't think about. Are you a regular purchaser of particular items? In my household we were buying baby food in LARGE quantities for our infant son. One day I accidentally discovered that people were selling baby food coupons on ebay. Did you know you can buy coupons on ebay? If you did, great. Are you getting any? You should be. Over the course of 4 months we saved $80.00 on baby food. $80!!!! Just by buying coupons for baby food off ebay. I'd buy 20 coupons at a time and get more whenever I needed them. I'd pay about $3.50 for $20 in savings. Not a bad deal!

You can also buy general grocery coupons that aren't particular to any one thing. 100 coupons at a time. You probably won't use them all, but for a $1 or so you'd be amazed at the savings you'll stumble across. Plus each time you get some it's like a little treasure chest of surprises.

Of course you should be clipping whatever coupons you can from your local paper if you get one.

Online Coupons

Whenever you shop online you should try to use a coupon or discount code whenever possible. Most online stores now have a place to insert a promotional code in the checkout page. Before you click that "check out" button you should jump over in another browser window and do a search for a coupon for that particular store. Such as buy.com coupons or Gap Coupons.

Some of my favorite online coupon code sites:

www.flamingoworld.com

www.incredibledvd.com

www.allonlinecoupons.com

www.couponcabin.com

Sometimes you can just browse these sites and run across some incredible deals, especially around the holidays. But don't use those as an excuse to go on a spending spree. You can't lose sight of your primary goal... pay off the debts!