looking for a deal

I will be the first to admit, I am completely new to the "art" of couponing. I'm learning though! I will just touch on a few basics in this post, and in another one I will get a bit more in depth and post many more places to check out.

One of the things that you may not know if you are just getting into couponing, is many places will let you use a store coupon and a manufacturers coupon together for the same item, and this is apparently where the great savings comes from (combine those with a sale price and/or register rebates and it could even be free!)
So far, the two stores that really stick out as having amazing deals are Target and Walgreens.
There are tons of blogs and other sites out there that do a lot of the "math" for you. I will post some of these in another post. There are also websites that are set up to trade coupons. These are pretty cool, but take a bit of figuring out..at least they did for me, but I have used them successfully, so they can't be tooo hard.
One of the biggest tips I can offer right now... subscribe to the Sunday paper. One of the websites I frequent suggests your local sunday paper as well as the largest paper in the area, because they often get more coupons. Build your collection, and keep it organized. I personally clip all the coupons out, because of the sites I can trade the ones I'm not interested in for ones I do want.
Many times if you go straight to the manufacturers site, they have coupons you can print off their site, that may not normally be in your paper. I have done this with places like 7th generation, pampers, huggies, mrs. T's perogies, colgate, etc. You do have to sign up on their website and "subscribe" so it creates some junk email, but you can always create a seperate email account just for this, that way you don't have to worry about sifting through junk mail to find emails from friends. Some sites offer to mail you things in snail mail instead of online, some offer both. I always take the home mailings, because then I don't have to print the coupons myself, and it makes it easier to trade those coupons if I don't need or want them. Plus it saves my ink and paper.

Staples offers recycling on ink catridges and gives you 3 dollars store credit quarterly. You can turn in 10 a month for money, you can turn in more if you want...but I think it's better to just turn in the 10 in one month and save the otehrs until you have another 10 for another month. You have to sign up for this as well, but it saves you money, as you get 10% back in ink and paper purchases (you need to make sure you have 10 dollars worth for them to give you credit..or make sure you work it so you have enough ink cartridge returns at teh same time).