JuiceBoxJungle

Printing Coupons--Does it Save Money?

Posted 2 months ago on Mom For Him

If you’ve been around for any amount of time, you know I am ALL about internet printable coupons! :-) I post Kroger and Roundy’s printable coupon matches each week, as well as other great high-value printable coupons that I find that I think you might be interested in.

Because I print and use so many coupons each week, I’ve often wondered how much I am spending on printing costs. Several years ago, we bought a cheap Lexmark printer at Walmart. It has served us well, but we later learned that a cheap printer does NOT mean cheap printer cartridge refills. One replacement cartridge would cost about $32 on sale at Target! Once I started printing a lot more (coupons, worksheets, etc), this was no longer cost-effective.

So does printing coupons really save me money? YES! I’ve found some ways to save so that the amount of money I save using internet printable coupons far outweighs what I spend on ink. That’s because the internet coupons are almost always higher value coupons, and when my store doubles them, I usually save another $1 per coupon. Those dollars add up!

Here are some tips that I use to save money on ink and paper while printing coupons:

Change your printer’s default settings to print in black and white, on the draft setting. I always print my coupons this way, and rarely have a problem with them scanning as long as my cartridge alignment is correct.
Refill the cartridges at Walgreens. Walgreens often has cartridge refills on sale for $10 each, so I save my empty cartridges and take them all to be filled when there is a sale. Hopefully I have some RRs to use on those weeks! ;-)
Use the back sides of papers. If I get some junk mail or papers sent home that don’t have important information on the back, they go straight to my printer to be made into coupons!
Ask for a ream of paper or refill cartridges for Christmas. Hey, I’m a practical person!
Before buying a new printer, investigate how much the refills are. I’ve been trying to do this the past few months as we’ve been wondering if we could save even more on printing if we got a new printer. The problem is, reviews are usually mixed, and it’s hard to get a straight answer about how many pages you can print with a cartridge.

The JuiceBox widget on my sidebar has an ad from Kodak right now about saving money on ink by switching. Does anyone have a Kodak printer, and do you think it saves you money on ink? It was one of the models I was looking at, since the replacement cartridges are less expensive. They have a calculator to see how much you overpay in ink here, but they didn’t have my printer’s model. Plus, I wasn’t able to select that I really only print in black and white, and not very much in color. What I’d really like to see is how many pages of black and white coupons I could print before having to refill my cartridge for any given brand. Is that too much to ask? (well, maybe. . .)

Speaking of saving money, Kodak and JuiceBoxJungle want to know what you would do with an unexpected $100 this month. If you are on Twitter, you can finish a tweet that’s been started in the widget on my sidebar. How would I spend it? Hmmm. . . the possibilities are endless! I would probably donate some and then get a babysitter so Ted and I could go out on a date, maybe some dinner and ballroom dancing! Yes, I have ballroom danced while “out-to-here” pregnant—it’s probably a funny sight! :-) Other ideas could be a new winter jacket (since mine is getting a little tight around the middle, and winter isn’t nearly over!), a massage, some homeschooling curriculum. . . wow, $100 isn’t too hard to spend, is it? Realistically, most of it would probably go toward our mortgage payment, which we are trying to pay down “with gazelle-like intensity” (per Dave Ramsey). :-) Exciting, I know, but again, we are practical people!
What would you spend $100 on? I’d love to hear your ideas!

Kodak and JuiceBoxJungle sponsored me to write this post, about what I’d do with a surprise $100 if someone handed it to me next month. It’s fun to dream!