Guest post from Carly!

Hey everybody! I'm Carly, Lauren's cousin [by way of her cousin Lee]. She's off on her awesome vacation and I'm...not...but I'm trying not to hate her too much for it ;)

A few months ago I decided to go back to school to get my master's degree in education. I got my undergrad a few years ago in public relations, so to get my master's in education I had to go back full-time, which meant quitting my full-time job. Now we're living on just one income [plus my student loans] and we're doing fine, but we're trying to find every way we can to save some money.

Sooo, I thought I'd share some of the things I've found to help save money. I figured everybody likes to save money! Maybe yall already know about all this, but if you don't, maybe it'll help :)

{1} Couponing. I've been using coupons for a few months now, and we've really saved a LOT of money on groceries, and we're getting GOOD food! Since I've been using the coupons I've been saving about 50% on my groceries. A lot people can save 70-80% every time they go, but I'm not that good yet. Lee likes to take yogurt to work, and last week we went to the store and got him four 4-packs of yogurt for 25 cents each. Even when you go to Wal-Mart and get their brand it's about 40 cents a cup.

There are tons of blogs out there that match up grocery stores' sales every week to coupons that are out there. They list what's on sale and tell you which insert the coupon was in and what date the coupons came. My favorites are I Heart Publix, Southern Savers, and Money Saving Mom. I subscribe to the newspaper so I get the Sunday paper with the coupons every week, then I take out the coupon inserts and put the date on them and then file them in a big box. They all give tips for organizing the coupons too, so you can figure out which way works best for you.

{2} Fantabulously Frugal. This blog is awesome. She lists all kinds of sales on there. About this time last year Amazon had a huge magazine sale and I got a subscription to Real Simple for $5! She also lists what the sales are on a bunch of daily deal websites pretty much every day. Also, thanks to Fantabulously Frugal, Lee and I are about to sign up for a deal where you pay $12.99 a month and get two Fandango movie codes. Pretty good I think, considering movie tickets around here are about $10 a pop.

{3} Groupon. I really shouldn't have this on my list of ways I save money because I haven't actually used it yet. But I've seen some awesome deals. If you're not familiar, you just put your city and they'll email good deals for that location every day. If they don't have your city you can just put the one closest to you. A lot of their deals are national-type deals. Lots of times they'll have a deal where you pay $5 for $10 worth of food. It's pretty awesome, and I'm sure I'll actually use it when we get closer to Christmas!

I think that's all I've got for now. I hope I've helped a little bit...or at least passed some time while Lauren's gone!