coupons Archives - Lazy Man and Money

A couple of months ago, I mentioned how I came across a book called The Lazy Couponer by Jamie Chase. Since we shared a similar background, Lazy folk from Massachusetts, I kindly asked her to do a guest post for me. Those tips became the article: Top 10 Couponing Tips from the Lazy Couponer.

I promised Jamie Chase a book review and finally, I’m making good on that. (Though admittedly, you’ll get more couponing tips from the previous aforementioned post.) The biggest thing that attracted me to the book was her unique approach to Extreme Couponing. Extreme Couponing on TLC is fun to watch because you see people get $600 worth of stuff for 12 cents and laugh a little bit at their hoard of 212 toothpastes. Just because I like to watch something on television, it doesn’t mean that I want to live that life. I’m okay with only having 5 toothpastes at any given time. I don’t want to spend hours collecting and looking through coupons to match up the best deals.

Chase’s approach is much more practical. She comes from an approach of needing a couple of items and figuring out how to get them mostly for free. For example, this can include combining a store coupon and a manufacturer’s coupon on an item at CVS along with a total order coupon like a “save $4 when you spend $20”, which is fairly common for CVS (we got two of them last night for example). Some, actually most, of the couponing scenarios are a little more complicated than that. As Chase explains the key is to start off small and not try to absorb all the deals and all the coupon policies from all the stores. It’s a recipe for disaster for a coupon newbie (like myself).

I learned a lot of things in this book. However, if I had to pin it down to three things that stand out, I’d go with:

I learned that CVS, Rite Aid, and Kmart actually have value due to their coupon policies. I had previously considered WalMart and Target the best drug store alternatives. (Well, I like to use military commissaries, but this isn’t an option for most people.)
I learned that for something that seems simple, handing a coupon to a person, there’s an awful lot of terminology to understand.
Finally, I learned that there are a number of websites with databases of what coupons are floating around there. If you just collect the inserts, you can use these websites to search for the deal, the insert, and the combination to best make it work.

Despite the title of The Lazy Couponer, I have to be honest… there’s a fairly steep learning curve and it is a little overwhelming. I can see why Jamie Chase teaches a class in it. It seems like it might be best absorbed in small steps. For the frugally-minded folks, this book is probably worth more than its weight in gold. For those who are entrepreneurial-minded, you might find that learning to coupon effectively is a skill that distracts you from your main focus.

Is it really possible to make money on Ebay?

Ninety-nine percent of the time that I hear, “make money on Ebay” it turns out that the person is simply getting rid of stuff they no longer want. I don’t consider that making money, because you lose the possession – one that you likely paid more for in the past. It simply isn’t sustainable. It still serves the purpose cleaning the house and getting a little extra spending cash. Let’s be honest, this way of “making money on Ebay” is not a business.

However, there are a number of people who are making money on Ebay. When I bought coupons on Ebay, I found out that the seller has thousands of coupons for sale. I don’t really know how the person or company does it, but they’ve found a way to charge a fair price for their time and service (clipping the coupons).

It got me thinking, “What kind of business could I start on Ebay?” Like many of the best business ideas, they come when don’t expect them. Let me backtrack and give you the inspiration. My wife often falls asleep at inopportune times. It’s not narcolepsy or anything else that doctors have been able to diagnose. In any case, I often get a little worried when she’s driving late at night. Then I found this caffeine spray. It sounds like a good deal and something that would be handy to have in her purse or car (caffeine always helps her wake up). At $5 it’s about the right price… until you factor in the $6 of shipping to my home – making it a very unfriendly $11 for a single unit. I did an Internet search and found that others felt the same way as I did about shipping. I look around the Internet for some time and couldn’t find the product available cheaper anywhere else (Note: on publishing this article, I noticed that someone added a small quantity of cheap caffeine spray at a cheap price).

So here’s the business idea. Go to Think Geek and buy 1,000 of the sprays for $4,990 plus $121 for shipping (the price for locale may be different than yours). This is a total of $5,111 or 5.11 dollars per unit. If you can find a way to ship a very light item cheaply, you are in business. Of course, it also requires that there’s a demand for caffeine spray – something that I believe to be true. If you can provide it someone for $9 instead of $11, there’s got to be room for you to make a couple of dollars on each sale.

Why don’t I do this myself? Well, I’m Lazy. Physically shipping the item out 1,000 times sounds like work to me (though some of people are doing it, so it can’t be that bad). I don’t want to take the risk of having a 1,000 of these sitting around. I’ve also realized that I’m in the business of producing ideas on this website, not exactly implementing them. That’s a good thing because implementation is often not my strong suit.

So take the idea and run with it… or look run your own Ebay business as a reseller of a unique product. If you do, please leave me a note in the comments.

Photo Credit: Rick and Lynne