Conn. woman masters art of coupon clipping

Clipping coupons early on a Saturday or Sunday morning while sipping coffee is the easy part. Organizing those varying-sized slips of paper, tossing expired offers, and remembering to actually bring the coupons to the store present the challenge. And really, don’t people buy products simply because they have a coupon? Plus, who can find the time? Gina Juliano of Enfield has honed the secret of coupon shopping — a secret that last year garnered her $11,000 of groceries, toiletries, and the like for just $2,200 (that’s $8,800 of free stuff). Better yet, she’s willing to share that secret. Got a $300-a-week grocery bill? Savvy shopping might cut that to $50. Facebook devotee? Juliano recently entered a drawing simply by “liking” a page and scored a free quarter-carat pair of diamond earrings. And best of all, her website readers don’t spend hours poring over grocery, online, and drugstore offers — or clipping coupons, for that matter. This labor of love for the school-principal-by-day, savings-hawk-by-weekend has Juliano doing all the heavy lifting on her Gina’s Kokopelli (a Native American deity) website, which greets visitors with: “Welcome to my manic obsession with all things coupon/free/cheap.” All readers need do is clip the proper coupons and follow a few rules — rules that range from “shop like a guy” and “don’t be a label snob,” to “never, ever pay full price for anything.” Worried about the time involved? “After you get in the swing of things, it shouldn’t take you more than an hour to compile your list, clip your coupons,” Juliano promises, though she warns that first-timers may need a couple of hours to sort things out. If that still sounds like too much effort, bear in mind: “Consider how much money you’re going to be saving, how much more you’re putting in your pocket,” she says. Juliano’s annual savings break down to $169 for an hour of work a week — not bad for compiling lists and printing/clipping coupons. And that savings is getting Juliano and her husband, Gary McNeff, to Cancun for a vacation. “That’s pretty darn good for a part-time job,” the 43-year-old says. —— From necessity Juliano, a 20-year educator, was a school principal before she got laid off in June 2009. Unemployment checks totaled about $26,000 a year. “When you make $104,000 a year, you live like you make that much. I never used coupons, or if I did, it would be 20 cents off or something — once,” she says. “I realized something had to change.” In surfing the Internet, Juliano found nothing in the way of a coupon/sales clearinghouse for grocery store deals specific to Connecticut. All told, she spent about six months mastering how to locate and match up deals. She now pores through weekly fliers and matches coupons to sales “so you pay the absolute minimum.” Many coupons may be printed from her website. For other deals, Juliano will direct readers to a link or a coupon insert. Newbies be warned: It’s a whole new language. The “1-30-11SS” listed with one deal means the reader needs the Jan. 30, 2011, Smart Source coupon insert in the weekend newspaper. “RP” stands for Red Plum, “PG,” Procter & Gamble. (Not each insert comes out every week.) So her website listing of “Birds Eye steamfresh veggies 1.00 ($1/3 01-23-11 SS or printable (equals) .66 each)” means this: The package sells for $1, but there’s a $1 coupon off three packages in the Jan. 23 Smart Source insert, a coupon that also may be printed directly from her website. Each package ends up costing just 66 cents. “I buy five weekend papers a week,” — the Journal Inquirer, of course — she says, “and make that money back 1,000 times. I guarantee that if people do what I tell them to do, they can cut their grocery bill in half in six weeks.”

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