The 3 Craziest Things I Bought When I Was Extreme Couponing

Looking for ways to reduce costs when shopping can be a good thing, as the less you spend on groceries and other household or personal care items, the more money you end up being able to keep in your bank account. 

But, it's definitely possible to take your efforts to save a little too far. I learned this years ago, when I got very into "extreme couponing." This was the process of using tons of coupons and searching out deals, not just in order to keep credit card bills down when buying essentials, but for the purpose of getting tons of stuff for free.

For several years, I clipped tons of coupons and spent time at multiple drug stores and grocery stores, all for the purpose of scoring carts full of goods for pennies on the dollar. Unfortunately, this ended up leading me to make lots of off-the-wall purchases -- including the following three items. 

1. Diabetes monitors (without having diabetes) 

The weirdest thing I purchased as an extreme couponer was diabetes monitors. I purchased probably close to a dozen of these items over the years. I tried to donate or give them away, but most places did not want to take them even though they were new in the box.

There was a "good" reason for buying these. Drugstores routinely offered deals where you could buy the monitors and get perks for doing so. For example, CVS would give you ExtraBucks for purchasing them -- and manufacturers also gave away coupons to make them free because they wanted you to buy the monitor and then use their test strips over time. When you combined the manufacturer and store deal, you could end up getting paid to buy them. 

2. 100 Robitussin cough syrups 

Robitussin cough syrup was another item I ended up getting paid to buy when combining coupons and cash back drugstore deals. The deal was so good and there was an abundance of coupons available, and the deal went on for a long time. 

Every time I would go to the drugstore to do another coupon deal, I would buy Robitussin both so that I could get the money back on the item and so I would be able to use discount coupons like $5 off a $25 purchase (the Robitussin would help me get over that threshold). 

After about a month of doing this, I ended up with more than 100 bottles of the cough syrup in my guest bedroom which I luckily ended up being able to resell. 

3. Air fresheners 

Plug-in air fresheners were another product that I was paid to buy so I ended up purchasing a ton of them -- even though I didn't use them. These were also items I was able to resell but at one time I had around 20 or 30 of them in my house.

Ultimately, the problem was that putting together "deals" to use coupons or get back more than I spent resulted in buying a lot of weird things -- these items included. And that is one big reason I gave up extreme couponing since I was spending time both buying unnecessary things and finding homes for them.  

I've now found better ways to save money and bulk up my bank account, so the diabetes monitors and cough medicine can stay on the shelves where they belong.