Printing Coupons, Ink Guzzlers, Facebook, and other general tips!

Quick post, then back to homework! A friend of mine is new to coupons and I'm trying to help her out, but my time is so limited.

First of all, she asked where to get printable coupons from. There are TONS of places, but one of the best places to start is simply coupons.com. There are more that can be found here from one of my favorite bloggers. Facebook and brands pages are also great places to get coupons. More & more "brands" are offering exclusive coupons only on Facebook. Since we are discussing printables, here are some tips for printing at home:

• Use cheap paper. It doesn't matter if you use the whitest brightest paper or the heaviest weight, they will still scan and they will still cut. LOL. Also, if you don't mind forking out a little bit, buy in bulk. A lot of office supply stores offer deals and coupons that will lower your cost. I've even heard some people use notebook paper, but I haven't tried that yet. I'm afraid my laserjet will eat it all up, lol.
• When you start saving some money, get a non-ink eating laserjet printer that prints only in black. Coupons don't need color to scan and neither do the stores.
• Switch your ink settings to draft or the lowest quality available. Don't let your coupons guzzle up all your ink- that stuff is expensive!
• Some coupons print on only the top portion of the page. In the past, I've cut that portion off, and used the half sheets to print other coupons I knew where only going to print on that top portion. I also keep a stack of the half sheets for my kids to use for crafts, drawing, etc.

 Okay, so now that you've "liked" tons of pages and blogs on facebook your news feed is all clogged up with hundreds of posts every freaking minute. You can hide them, but then you can't see when they offer a new coupon. Well, facebook actually did something right for once! You can create a "friend" list and put pages on it! So, what I've done is hide 90% of all my brands I like, stores, restaurants, and bloggers from my actual news feed and created a friend list for each one. This is much easier to show you than to tell you, so here is some visuals:

Okay, so one more HUGE tip. Create a new email address that you will use for only your coupons, blog subscriptions, sweepstakes, etc. I've even heard of people creating one for each, but I can't keep up with that many emails! LOL. I've also heard of some people doing the same thing for facebook, but I think it works fine with the above friend list idea. And one other tip, if you are entering contests, giveaways, and other things, check your SPAM frequently. If you happen to win, a lot require the winner to contact them within 24 to 48 hours and if you don't receive the email, you generally won't ever even know you won. I've had EVERY SINGLE thing I've won go to my spam filter, so make sure to scan them frequently.

Well, I hope this helps some of you out and if you have any questions, ask in the comments below or on my Facebook page, The Couponing Mommy!

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