What's the Secret to Extreme Couponing?

If you've ever been interested in saving money to bring down your credit card bills or accomplish other financial goals, you've probably come across the concept of extreme couponing.

Extreme couponing isn't just giving the cashier a coupon or $0.50 off a jar of pasta. There's much more to it if you want to truly save the maximum possible to keep the most cash you can in your bank account. In fact, here is the big secret to extreme couponing successfully.

Combining deals to score items for free or for pennies on the dollar

The key to extreme couponing is not to take advantage of just one deal but to take advantage of multiple deals at the same time. By stacking the deals available to you, you can get great prices on items.

Here's an example of how this might work:

• A store is running a buy-one-get-one-free deal on a shampoo that costs $3.
• The manufacturer of the shampoo had a coupon for $1.50 off a bottle in the Sunday paper a few weeks before the store sale that has not expired yet.
• The store is running a promotion where you can get $5 off a $20 purchase.

If you had multiple shampoo coupons and there was no limit to the deal, you could buy 16 bottles of the shampoo. Due to the buy-one-get-one-free deal, you would "pay" for eight bottles at a cost of $24 so you would qualify for the $5 off a $20 purchase. And you could use 16 buy-one-get-one-free coupons if you had multiple Sunday paper inserts or had purchased them online. The 16 coupons for $1.50 each would add up to $24 so you would get all of the bottles of shampoo for free plus another $5 worth of merchandise you didn't pay for due to the $5 off $20 promotion.

This is a simplified example since you might not necessarily want to buy 16 bottles of shampoo -- you could maybe buy four or eight bottles and combine that with another coupon deal or two in order to get the $5 off $20 coupon.

The point is, you would want to put together a combination of store sales, manufacturer and online coupons, and other special promotions in order to pay either nothing or very little for everything you were buying.

How easy is it to implement this secret of extreme couponers?

Extreme couponing is both easy and difficult at the same time. If you know the techniques and tricks, it's simple to put together the deals, but it can take some time and effort to do it.

The first thing you'll need to do is figure out how to combine different promotions. There are entire forums dedicated to this at websites like Slickdeals.net.

You would also need to make sure you have the right coupons in place, which often means having multiple coupons. You can buy a bunch of Sunday papers or get inserts from friends and clip and store coupons in a binder or folder or you can buy multiples of coupons online.

Finally, you'd need to take the time to go to different stores to get the deals of the week -- and, often, buy things you don't really need in order to make the promotions work. These items can be resold or donated.

Ultimately, it's up to you to decide if taking these steps are worth your time and effort. Some people enjoy the process, and if you have the spare time and want to save money this way, it's certainly worth trying.