Saving made easy: Extreme couponing seminar teaches tricks to cutting grocery bill

KAILUA-KONA — The West Hawaii Today is typically a bustling scene, buzzing with the music of clattering keyboards and ringing telephones, but it’s pulse ratcheted up a notch Tuesday night when Charity Hauke staged her Extreme Coupon Workshop in the WHT newsroom.

Pop music and a boisterous Hauke greeted roughly 40 community members who arrived to learn a simple system of savings Hauke has converted into an art form, and which now saves the mother of five nearly $8,000 on her grocery bill every year.

The system, which Hauke learned from members of the television show Extreme Couponing on the Discovery Family channel in an identical seminar, created a margin of savings that helped her family save their home after the economic downturn in 2008.

Now, she teams up with those very same teachers to educate frugal segments of the American public all across the country — including large families, college students and elders on a fixed income — on how to achieve the same savings.

“I tried to coupon myself, and I failed miserably at it,” Hauke said. “I did every wrong step you could do, but then I went to a class, this class, that taught me how to do it.”

The crowd was engaged from the jump, as Hauke raffled off several gift cards and small door prizes, the winners flailing their arms and running up and down the aisles to a chorus of applause as though contestants on the Price is Right.

That was what the night was all about — making sure the price is right for consumers shopping in a state where groceries are as or more expensive than anywhere else in the country.

“We always find the need for people to learn how to coupon is so high here,” Hauke said. “You walk into the grocery store, and it’s just crazy how expensive everything is.”

The system Hauke teaches is simple and easily compartmentalized with a few basic rules. The first rule: consumers should always use a coupon with a store sale or promotion to get the highest rate of savings.

Second, consumers should always use multiple coupons. Often, manufacturers and individual stores offer discounts on the same products, and those coupons can be stacked on top of a sale price to achieve substantial savings.

Third, shoppers should buy the smallest packages possible to increase savings. They must also remember to be patient. Sales work in cycles, and within five months, almost every item in the store will be on sale at one point or another.

Stacking up on coupons by ordering the maximum home delivery of five Sunday newspapers allows shoppers to buy in bulk and supply their households with products during the portions of the cycle when they aren’t on sale.

Finally, shoppers should date coupons to be sure they don’t expire.

All this might sound like a great deal of work, but Hauke said that’s the number one misconception her workshop tries to dispel.

“The number one reason people don’t use coupons is because it takes too much time,” Hauke said. “If you learn how to do it, you can take extreme couponing and you can make it very efficient without a lot of time and without buying excessively.”

Hauke asserted that by using the workshop’s free website — Hawaiismartshopper.com, which lists local sales — it requires only two hours per week to save 50 to 60 percent on each grocery bill, typically spreading the shopping out between one supermarket and one drugstore.

Those who want to put in a little more time and energy can save 80-90 percent, Hauke said.

Attendees of the workshop left the hour-long seminar impressed and invigorated.

“I like that it’s pretty easy to access the coupons and the printables,” said Leilani Whittle.

Julie Aponte, a former dabbler, said she now plans to ratchet up her use of coupons to a whole new level.

“I didn’t realize how much you could do with the coupons,” Aponte said. “I have four kids at home, and a sister and a grandmother that all live in the house, so we have a big household. We can use all the savings we can get.”