Hi there! I'm Brenda, a mom of three in a two-income house where one of the incomes is me and my scissors. My husband Ron calls me the Refund Queen. He started out laughing. He stopped laughing in 1992 when the coupon money paid for the washer and dryer. Last year it paid for Christmas. This year I am shooting for $2,500, and as of last Wednesday I am at $2,140.65. Every penny is written down. Here's how I do it.

Sunday morning, coffee, the newspaper inserts and my scissors. I buy two Sunday papers when the inserts are good (my neighbor Dot saves me hers, too). I clip everything we actually use and nothing we don't. A coupon for something you'd never buy is not a savings, it is a coupon for spending money. This took me years to learn.

1. Double coupon day. My store doubles coupons up to 50 cents on Wednesdays. A 50-cent coupon becomes a dollar. I do the big shopping on Wednesday, always.
2. Stack it with a sale. A coupon on a full-price item is nice. A coupon, doubled, on an item that's on sale that week is where the real money is. I match my file to the store's weekly flyer before I leave the house.
3. Stockpile when it's free or nearly. When the stacking makes toothpaste 19 cents, I buy the limit and it goes in the hall closet. We have not paid full price for toothpaste, shampoo, cereal or pasta since about 1994.
4. Rebates are the second harvest. The forms on the shelf, the ones on the box, the ones in the inserts. Keep every receipt and every UPC. More on that below.

A shoebox is for beginners. I use a little accordion file with 24 pockets: dairy, cereal, baking, canned, frozen, paper goods, cleaning, health and beauty, pet, and so on, plus one pocket in the front for "this week" and one in the back for "expires this month." Every Sunday the expired ones come out. An expired coupon in your file is dead weight, and a lot of stores won't take them anymore.

This is the part people give up on, and it's the part that pays for the extras. In my kitchen drawer there's a big envelope. Every box, bag and bottle that had a rebate form gets its UPC symbol cut off and dropped in with the receipt stapled to the form. Once a month I sit down and mail them out: form, UPC, receipt with the item circled, a stamp. I write the date mailed on my calendar. Six to eight weeks later, checks. Little checks: $1, $2, $5. In 1998 the little checks came to $412. Two rules: never send a photocopied UPC or claim something you didn't buy (that's fraud, it's not a game), and keep a copy of what you sent, because about one in ten gets lost.

A chest freezer in the garage, bought used in 1993 for $75, is the best coupon tool I own. When chicken is on sale and I have the coupon, I buy ten pounds and freeze it in meal-sized bags with the date written on. Bread, butter, cheese and orange juice all freeze fine. The freezer paid for itself in the first two months.

August was the best month ever: back-to-school sales plus a triple-coupon weekend. September has the fall rebates starting to come in. October through December are always big, so I think $2,500 is going to happen.

• Use a coupon on the wrong item, or an expired one, and hope the cashier doesn't notice. The cashiers know me by name. I'd like to keep it that way.
• Buy junk we won't eat because it was "free." Free junk is still junk.
• Spend three hours to save four dollars. My time is worth something too. The whole system above takes me about two hours a week.
• Photocopy a coupon or a UPC. Ever.

Paying Off $23,000 in Debt (Steve and Amy, you're my heroes) · The Beardstown-Style Investment Club (where the savings should go next, Ron says) · The Working Mom's Notebook (Lisa's freezer plan and mine would get along) · The Lemonade Stand Ledger (a twelve-year-old who keeps better books than most grown-ups) · The WallStreet neighborhood