Expiration dates on coupons are magical marketing tricks that make you feel an urgency to use them. Remember, the reason that companies give out coupons in the first place isto convince you to purchase their product. Coupons don’t always save you money.
When you buy an item that you don’t need or that you wouldn’t usually buy without coupons, you are probably not saving money. Yes, you are saving money off the purchase price of that item, but you are not saving money in the long run because you still spent money that you didn’t have to or didn’t really want to.
If you have a coupon that gets you mustard for a quarter, and you use about three bottles of mustard in a year, go ahead and spend 75 cents on mustard. That’s a great deal! But if you buy six bottles, you probably wasted 75 cents. Keeping a two years supply of mustard is not practical, and you can probably get a similarly great deal within the year.
When you are planning your coupon shopping, really consider whether you need to use every good deal you find. No matter how cheap something might be, it’s not going to save more money than when you don’t spend money at all.