Couponing to the Extreme-Is the savings worth it?

I was hooked on couponing long before the popular TLC show "Extreme Couponing" made its debut. I will be the first to admit that you get a rush seeing your total amount decrease before your eyes at the register. Now in my personal experience on this couponing journey, I have never bought mulitple Sunday newspapers for coupon inserts, never needed a binder to store coupons in, or have I had to call a store ahead of my shopping trip to ask for pre orders of items I need/want. The savings from couponing in extreme conditions can be wonderful but the time used takes away from a person's family and is the stockpile those collect rational.

The people portrayed on the show spend, at the very least, 40 hours per week clipping coupons and planning the next grocery shopping trip. On top of that, these people ususally have full time jobs with young children at home. Therefore, that is the equivalant of two full time jobs plus other household duties. The time they could be spending with their families is spent calculating savings. I agree that the money saved will benefit long term financially, but in the long term what negative effects will it have on children in the home.

Items purchased through couponing are mostly processed foods. None of these types of foods is nourishing for our bodies and if you are feeding a family, the foods bought through couponing are fueling our families with the right nutrients. All of the items bought with coupons have a shelf life that last for years which means the preseverities are not healthy for anyone.

The stockpile of goods that are collected and stored in the home after these shopping extravaganzas are ususally quite large and may not be utilized in the best possible way. The space used to store these items is usually a space that would normally be used as a family area or bedroom/office space area. It is really a type of organized hoarding. They may be neatly stacked and organized on shelves but there is so much that it may never be used and eventually thrown away. So why should you hoard these items that someone may have been able to use? Why would anyone want to sacrifice living space that your family can use to stockpile so much stuff that may never be utilized by your family?

As I stated earlier, I like coupons. I think they are a wonderful way to save money and in past trips, I have saved quite a bit of money. I also have two small children at home who uses up quite a bit of the money saved. However, I also would not want to compromise their living space for the thrill of saving with coupons and having a stockpile of stuff that we may never use all of it. The little couponing I do fills a big enough void in my budget to continue without compromising my time or living space.