Zero Day

Hi, I'm the Coupon Crusader and I'm a recovering overpriced spender. This is the story of my discovery of extreme couponing and my instant fascination with the savings realized by extreme couponers, and my quest to earn these savings myself.

It all started a few days after Christmas, when TLC premiered their new show, Extreme Couponing. It featured people who not only discovered that coupons can save money, they made it a way of life. Walking into the grocery store and spending $10 on $1000 worth of goods sounded like a pretty sweet deal to me! So I started researching it and found the Krazy Coupon Lady (aka KCL, featured below via RSS feed). She was one of the people on the show, and it seemed to me that she knew what she was doing. So I bookmarked her site. And liked her page on Facebook. And followed her on Twitter. And I check her site several times a day. Just covering all the bases. Someone once told me that the best way to become great at something is to emulate someone who is already great at it.

This was Zero Day, what the Army called the first day of Air Assault training, a crash course for the uninitiated. And uninitiated I was! And probably still am, as couponing is something of a science. I was a bit overwhelmed at first with all of the names and lists and codes, so I kept reading, and eventually things started making sense. KCL's first step for beginners is a change in attitude about shopping: no more slavery to the price tag; expect to save between 50% and 90% on purchases and expect to have a year's supply of some goods!

This is what I'm talking about! Units in the army have departments known as Supply, headed by either an officer, a sergeant or both. They were the go-to guys, the ones with all the goods, and the best ones were always the ones in the brigade S-4 shop, who had supplies for thousands of people. They had stocks that would put a Super Walmart to shame! My friends and I prided ourselves on our ability to stockpile small things, such as paracord, MRE's (meals ready-to-eat), the little bottles of Tabasco sauce inside the MRE's, etc. Thus, the happy feeling of stockpiling for a rainy day is all too familiar to me, and probably part of what has made me so intense about couponing from the start.

So, Mr. Uninitiated, what's the next step, you say? Well, the next step for me was to stop reading the beginner's guide after the first page and scramble all over KCL's website seeing all the sites. Readings wild stories about people walking out of stores with several shopping carts full, having so many coupons that 2/3 of them had to be thrown away, and people having stocks of toilet paper to last 40 years...I was Pavlov's dog, salivating before the bell was even rung or the light came on!

But thankfully my senses got hold of me eventually and I returned to the lowly beginner's guide and continued reading...