Good Morning America featured a segment this morning on coupons and how much money people are saving these days by searching for and using online coupons.  In recent months, during this economic depression or recession or whatever they’re calling it, Americans are finding more and more ways to save money on their groceries, their clothing, necessities for the kids and the household and just about everything under the sun.  More and more coupon sites are popping up online to assist people to save money.

I admittedly felt really guilty as I watched this segment.  My husband is the “coupon king”, and over the years we have all teased him and harrassed him about his frugalness.  He’s one of those people that looks forward to the Wednesday grocery flyers with all the local grocery store specials.  Oh, and don’t even get us started on how long it takes him to get through the Sunday papers just to clip and cut coupons.

Then there’s always the arguments about where to go out for dinner.  No matter what we may be craving or where we want to go, we almost always end up someplace else because hubby has a two-for-one coupon.   It’s gotten to the point that whenever we’re planning an evening out with friends or family we don’t even discuss where we’re going, we just ask Bob where he has coupons for.

For the past 5 years or so he’s almost exclusively been our grocery shopper.  I still do all the menu planning and cooking, but he does all the shopping.  He’ll travel to 3 or 4 different stores on a typical Saturday morning because he knows exactly what’s on sale at each store and which coupons he has to match those sale items.

My husband came from a family of 7 kids, and this was the way his mother shopped and he learned to shop.  And now it appears to be the way that most Americans are also shopping.  After 30 plus years of living with the coupon mentallity, I’m used to it and appreciate the fact that my husband has saved us thousands of dollars over the years.

But today we have former CEOs who were earning close to a million dollars per year scouring through the newspapers and circulars for coupons.  Maybe this is a wakeup call to us all.  If we all (including myself), paid more attention to coupons and savings we can find both in our newspapers and online…we’d all have a few extra thousand dollars reserved for these tough economic times.

I’m sure online coupon searches will be increasing even more than 160% as we all continue to get through this recovery process.

If you have kids and are looking for special deals on kids meals and kids eat free, you might want to check out this site:  Kids Eat Free

No self promotion here…Other than for my grandson, I haven’t searched for  a free kids meal deal in a long time.  I just came upon this site and thought I’d share it with parents of littler ones.

Please let me know of other coupon sites, etc. that you’re aware of.  Leave your links if you have coupon sites, etc. to share with everyone.  It could save someone a lot of time and a lot of money just by sharing your links with us all.