4p for £600 of food?
Some of you may already have heard of a rather interesting young man called Jordon Cox. Also known as the Coupon Kid, he first hit the headlines a few years ago when he managed to buy almost £600 worth of food for just 4p, using coupons. He then donated it to homeless families in his town (Brentwood, where I am also from) for Christmas.
Where it all started for the coupon kid
He began couponing as a 15 year old, trying to help his mum to get by on a reduced income after his parents split up. Inspired by the American show Extreme Couponing, he became addicted to finding coupons to reduce the cost of their weekly shop.
Now he works as the coupon kid for MoneySavingExpert.com, helping even more families to save money.
Jordon says that with a bit of thought and planning you never have to pay full price for your supermarket shop and can easily save £1000 each year – maybe a lot more. It isn’t just about cutting coupons these days. You can write to manufacturers who may just give you some (this worked for me with some cat food vouchers), you can download phone apps and you can learn to combine coupons with special offers to maximise your savings.
In this book you will discover the various places to find coupons: online, by contacting companies direct, in magazines and in-store publications, in newspapers, through shop loyalty schemes, on product packaging, and even on receipts. Jordon tells you which are the best shopping apps to save money and where to find the best new customer discount codes.
Maximising your savings
Once you have your coupons, the coupon kid offers advice on how to redeem them and maximise their value. For example, if you find something on BOGOF and you have two coupons for the same item, you can reduce the cost of each item massively. If you are really clever, sometimes you can even get some items completely free!
Jordon also gives advice on how to save money generally, by finding yellow stickered products, switching down to cheaper brands, not going shopping hungry and looking at different aisles. For example, you can get cotton wool cheaper on the baby aisle than the beauty aisle and you can buy rice in bulk, and at discount, on the world foods aisle.
I found this an interesting and easy read. I have generally explored couponing very little as I do most of my shopping in Aldi and Lidl. Unfortunately, they rarely take coupons. However, Jordon has made me realise that there are other avenues I really should look into. If you want to be an even more savvy shopper with the coupon kid, I can recommend this book.
You can find Jordon’s blog at http://www.jordoncox.com/blog/.
This post contains affiliate links. If you click through and make a purchase I will earn a small commission. Thanks for your support. If you fancy looking through some of my other frugal reading recommendations, see My Frugal Bookshelf.
Frugal in Essex says
Apparently Lidl are committed to taking the coupon if they stock the product. I often read this young mans blog on MSE. We don’t get anywhere near the number of coupons that the USA seem to get. Some of the Proctor Gamble ones are worth it now and again. You do have to keep looking constantly as there is normally only so many printable ones available.
Tuppenny says
I didn’t know he had written a book so thank you for the review and letting us know. Jordan’s been in hospital for a few months so he probably wrote some of this whilst laid up for so long, poor kid!
I used to ‘do’ couponing 10 years ago when supermarkets allowed you to hand over coupons even if you didn’t buy the products. Saved loads until they tightened up their rules. Fair enough given manufacturers were probably losing money with this wheeze. Shame we don’t have the US level of couponing – I’d probably get back into it.