Sunday, March 06, 2011

Welcome to Couponeers

Welcome to Couponeers,

In our introductory post, I feel we should be introducing the posters and the purpose of this blog.

We're an ordinary married coupon without kids, dual-income, not earning any fantastic dollars or anything.  I have been in Australia for 8 years, and my husband has been here for over 20 years.  My english isn't that great, so my initial posts will contain bad English.  My husband will be fixing my grammar for some of the posts he feels is more important.  We live in Melbourne, so most of our articles and reviews will be based around Melbourne institutions.

With the blunders of the Labour Government for the last 4 years, cost of living, and more specifically, the cost of food, electricity, gas and water have skyrocketed.  Our electricity bill used to be a monthly average of $80 just 4 years ago, but now our monthly averages are exceeding $200 (my last bill for 2 months of electricity was over $700!!!).  Furthermore, we both work late, and my husband works very long hours.  So we've hardly got time to cook at home during week days.  To save in living costs, we've been using coupons for some of our necessities since 4 years ago.

However, 4 years of coupon usage has taught us that experience can be extremely varied for us coupon users.  Entertainment book coupon users have only had to suffer the post-bill service difference... but the advent and rise of group purchase coupon sites have changed the scene dramatically.  Service may be flakey for coupon users at a particular institution, whereas at another, we may be treated the same as full-price paying consumers.  This has prompted us to share our experiences, tips and suggestions on how to maximize your experience in using coupons to shave off those rising living costs.

I hope that publicity of our blog will prompt Melbourne institutions to stop offering coupons if they are going to treat coupon users like 2nd class citizens, and start only offering deals that they can honour.  I also think coupon sites shouldn't take the kind of % I've heard them taking (up to 50%?... come on... I think 15 - 20% is what we can reasonably expect).

To celebrate our opening post, I'll post a couple of tips:

Tip #1: Coles and the Entertainment book
If you shop at Coles often, you should definitely invest in an Entertainment book.  It gives you access to 5% off giftcards.  We've been shopping at Coles (which is the closest supermarket to our home) with these gift cards for the last 2 years... We're treated the same as any other card-paying customer, and there haven't been any issues buying stuff with these cards. My husband says we save about $100 / year from the 5%, which he calculated as: (Average monthly spend * 5% - payment time difference * applicable interest rate)... this more than pays off the Entertainment book.
Example:
- It is January the 1st.
- My credit card billing cycle is on 15th of each month.
- I purchase a Coles gift card for $500 today.
- I receive my Coles gift card on 14th.
- I go grocery shopping on the 17th for $300.
- I go grocery shopping on Feb 28th for $200.
- This means I pay $475 on 15th of January to my bank, rather than $300 on 15th of Feb, and $200 on 15th of March.
- So the saving is $25, less the lost interest on $300 for 1 month (at 6% per annum, this is 0.5% per month), less the lost interest on $175 for 2 months... equating to a total saving of $21.75 from using the Coles voucher + Credit Card as opposed to just using your credit card.
If you don't shop at Coles, we don't suggest you change supermarkets or grocers just to make use of this offer.  If you don't know where to buy an Entertainment book, please contact us with your location, and we'll find out for you.  The 2011-2012 Entertainment book is going on sale soon, so I suggest you pre-order quickly to maximize your usage of the book.

Tip #2: Your credit card as a source of savings
My husband loves his credit card.  We pay an annual fee on it, and I've always wondered why he likes it so much... since he's the most frugal person I've ever met on the planet!!! I don't understand his reasoning, but he says that since we spend over $20,000 a year on basic necessities... food, petrol, bills, etc... the 0.5% interest savings is worth a lot more than the annual fee.  Furthermore, most credit card reward programs rebate about 0.6% of the transaction value to the customer.  We pay with credit card whenever the surcharge is less than or equal to 1% based on these 2 factors.

My husband has a Bachelor of Commerce and an MBA both from the University of Melbourne, so I think you can trust his money calculations!

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